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arthur holmes
Arthur Holmes began studying physics at the Imperial College of Science in London, but switched to geology before graduating in 1910. In 1913, before he even earned his doctoral degree, he proposed the first geological time scale, based on the fairly recently discovered phenomenon of radioactivity. Using his quantititive time scale and other factors, he made an estimate of Earth's age that was far older than anyone had suggested until then -- 4 billion years. His initial estimates of Earth's era -
allfred wegner
We are taught that modern scientists are driven only by reason and facts. It was only early scientists like Galileo who needed to fear the reaction to their radical views. Neither of these beliefs is true. The reaction to Alfred Wegener's Continental Drift Theory demonstrates that new ideas threaten the establishment, regardless of the century. Alfred Wegener was the scientist who proposed the Continental Drift Theory in the early twentieth century. Simply put, his hypothesis proposed that the -
Harry Hess
Harry Hess was a professor of geology at Princeton University (USA), and became interested in the geology of the oceans while serving in the US Navy in World War II. His time as a Navy officer was an opportunity to use sonar (also called echo sounding), then a new technology, to map the ocean floor across the North Pacific. He published ‘The History of Ocean Basins' in 1962, in which he outlined a theory that could explain how the continents could actually drift. This theory later became known
