John Davidson Lecture - Tasmania and Revival of Continental Drift
Event description
Our guest speaker for June is international consultant and geology expert John K Davidson who will speak on Tasmania and Revival of Continental Drift. John says of his talk that:
"The Earth was formed over four billion years ago and has evolved by three principal evolutions, Continental Drift as the 'boats', Plants and Animals as the 'passengers' that travelled through the Climatic Zones and evolved under the influence of glaciations. This lecture concerns the history of human recognition of the movement of the Earth's continents, now referred to as 'continental drift'. It is focussed on the last 4,000 years of recorded recognition of the Drift processes, the last 1/1,000,000th of the age of the Earth. Most geologists assign the discovery of Continental Drift to Alfred Wegener in the early twentieth century but the Minoans could 'map' the stars and sail from Crete to the mouths of the Nile River, 4,000 years ago. The first mapped , movement of continents is seen in the reproduction of Eratosthenes' of c.220BCE, followed by Ortelius' 1596 map, then via geological and botanical advances and retreats until Professor S W Carey's cartographically accurate map presented in Hobart in 1956, which put Continental Drift beyond doubt. The major steps on this path from the Ancient Greeks to 'get the Drift' include a disproportionate number of visitors to Tasmania including the botanist Labillardiere in 1793, Charles Darwin the geologist in 1831, Joseph Dalton Hooker the botanist from 1839 and then 'the locals', the most recent being a lecture two months ago to the Royal Society by Dr Keith Corbett.”
From this firmer historical basis, John will propose a pulsing Earth with a low but significant rate of expansion, contrary to the current paradigm of Plate Tectonics, an interpretation of Carey's 1956, New Global Tectonics.
I hope you will join us for this occasion. Drinks in the foyer of the Earth Sciences Building UTAS from 3.30pm. Lecture in the Geology Lecture Room beginning at 4pm.