For hundreds of years it was noted that the Earth’s continents could have fitted together, but it took until the middle of the last century for a mechanism by which they moved apart to be accepted. Now the plate tectonic model of the Earth is taught at all levels, from primary school upwards.
In 1962, Fred Vine, who has died aged 85, was a research student at Cambridge University. His supervisor, Drummond Matthews, tasked him with interpreting the complex topography and magnetic anomalies that had been mapped in a small area of the north-west Indian Ocean straddling the Carlsberg Ridge, part of the global system of mid-ocean ridges.
