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.
To do so, he drew on three controversial ideas on the fringes of geology – sea-floor spreading, reversals of the Earth’s magnetic field, and continental drift – and synthesised them into a model of the geological dynamics of the ocean floor that forms the basis of plate tectonics.
His interpretation confirmed the central prediction of the sea-floor spreading hypothesis, that new ocean crust was continually being generated by magma coming up through the centres of mid-ocean ridges, and that the age of the ocean floor must therefore increase laterally away from the ridges. The observed pattern of magnetic anomalies could be accounted for only if it was assumed that the ocean crust consisted of approximately 20km-wide strips parallel to the ridge crest, magnetised alternately by a reversed geomagnetic field and by a normal one (in the sense of a similar direction to today).
While he was doing his sea-floor work, a study of nine radiometrically dated lava samples with differing magnetisation was published, suggesting that there had been two geomagnetic reversals in the last 3m years. When applied to the magnetic patterns on the ocean floor, this timescale indicated the rate of sea-floor spreading.
All the major features of the ocean floor could be linked into a single model in which oceanic crust was created at ridges and disappeared back into the mantle at deep ocean trenches. Moreover, the time required to cycle the crust from mid-ocean ridge to trench was startlingly short, 150m years. Thus the ocean basins were young everywhere, whereas the continental crust was known to be billions of years old.
A final implication was that if the continents were to wander independently across the globe over geological time, as other rock-magnetic studies had already shown they did, they must have done so while firmly attached to adjacent ocean crust in a single rigid plate.
On the basis of Vine’s initial graduate work, in September 1963 he and Matthews published a now-famous paper, Magnetic Anomalies Over Oceanic Ridges, in the scientific journal Nature. Though the actual term came later, Vine’s interpretation of Matthews’ data was the birthing point of plate tectonics.
Curiously, the paper attracted little attention for several years, during which Vine finished his PhD in 1965 and took up a post at Princeton University in the US. He published several more papers demonstrating that the “V & M hypothesis” could solve other conundrums in marine geology, explaining patterns of magnetic stripes on the Pacific Ocean floor that had seemed baffling to their original finders.
It was not until a conference in New York in 1966 that the participants were generally convinced by the evidence that sea-floor spreading was a reality and that magnetic patterns on the ocean floor could be used to deduce the past rates and directions of spreading. The remaining elements of the plate tectonic synthesis followed soon after, and it became universally accepted that on geological timescales the Earth’s crust is a dynamic, mobile entity in constant self-renewal. Much of the history of the Earth can now be understood in plate tectonic terms.
Born in Chiswick, south-west London, Fred was the son of Ivy (nee Bryant) and Frederick Sr, an accountant. Educated at Latymer Upper school, where he subsequently taught for a short while, he went on to study natural sciences at St John’s College, Cambridge, graduating in 1962. Geophysics had caught his imagination and as a research student he joined the department of geodesy and geophysics, headed by Sir Edward Bullard, who supported Vine’s work in multiple ways.
Matthews introduced him to his research assistant Sue McCall, and they married in 1964. In 1970 the couple left Princeton and Vine took up a post in the newly established school of environmental sciences at the University of East Anglia (UEA). Though he continued to work on plate tectonics, his attention turned to studying places where oceanic crust was exposed on land, such as the Troodos mountains of Cyprus, where a complete section is exposed.
Vine revelled in the multi-disciplinary ethos of the school. In 1974 he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society and appointed to a professorship at UEA. He and a colleague taught a course on global energy policy, and he established a degree course with the adjacent school of mathematics and physics, as well as a joint facility used by scientists from all over Britain for measuring electrical conductivity and seismic velocities of rocks at high temperatures and pressures.
He established a rock magnetics laboratory, worked on the history of the Earth’s magnetic field, and encouraged younger colleagues to expand its use into environmental magnetics, now an important topic in health and environment disciplines. His book with Philip Kearey, Global Tectonics, became a standard text, and he nurtured the Climatic Research Unit, which played an important part in the discovery of human-induced climate change.
Retiring as emeritus professor in 2008, Vine was modest about his success, anxious to give credit to others and would insist that he “just happened to be around at the right time”.
He is survived by Sue, their children, Rachel and Stephen, and six grandchildren.
• Frederick John Vine, marine geologist and geophysicist, born 17 June 1939; died 21 June 2024
