The Juan De Fuca Plate

In the history of science, the theory of plate tectonics is so recent that one might expect that the details of its development would be unequivocally documented. Strangely, they are not. A number of books, a recent special AGU session, and countless articles have tried to follow the thread that captured all those ephemeral sparks of insight in a working theory. There are still almost as many views of how it happened as there are scientists involved (see Figure 1).