The Birth of Plate Tectonics
The new hypotheses of the early 1960s explained several puzzling
sets of observations. All that remained was a synthesis of these
hypotheses.
The synthesis began in 1965 when Tuzo Wilson introduced the term
plate for the broken pieces of the Earth's lithosphere. In 1967, Jason
Morgan proposed that the Earth's surface consists of 12 rigid plates that
move relative to each other. Two months later, Xavier Le Pichon
published a synthesis showing the location and type of plate boundaries
and their direction of movement.
Since the mid-1960s, the plate tectonic model has been rigorously
tested. Because the model has been successfully tested by numerous
methods, it is now called the plate tectonic theory and is accepted by
almost all geologists.
