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One geologist later described it as "probably the most significant paper in the earth sciences ever to be denied publication."
有一位地質(zhì)學(xué)家后來把它描述成“很可能是有史以來被拒絕發(fā)表的最有意義的地球科學(xué)論文”。
At all events, mobile crust was an idea whose time had finally come. A symposium of many of the most important figures in the field was convened in London under the auspices of the Royal Society in 1964, and suddenly, it seemed, everyone was a convert. The Earth, the meeting agreed, was a mosaic of interconnected segments whose various stately jostlings accounted for much of the planet's surface behavior.
無論如何，提出地殼移動的觀點(diǎn)的時刻終于來到了。1964年，該領(lǐng)域許多最重要的人物出席了由英國皇家學(xué)會在倫敦主辦的研討會。突然之間，好像人人都改變了觀點(diǎn)。會議一致認(rèn)為，地球是一幅由互相連接的斷片組成的鑲嵌畫。它們擠擠搡搡的樣子說明了地球表面的許多現(xiàn)象。
The name "continental drift" was fairly swiftly discarded when it was realized that the whole crust was in motion and not just the continents, but it took a while to settle on a name for the individual segments. At first people called them "crustal blocks" or sometimes "paving stones." Not until late 1968, with the publication of an article by three American seismologists in the Journal of Geophysical Research , did the segments receive the name by which they have since been known: plates. The same article called the new science plate tectonics.
過不多久，“大陸漂移”的名字便被棄之不用，因?yàn)槿藗円庾R到，在移動的不光是大陸，而是整個地殼。但是，過了一段時間才為那些斷片確定了名字。起先，人們稱其為“地殼積木”，有時候還稱其為“鋪路石”。直到1968年末，三名美國地震學(xué)家在《地球物理研究雜志》發(fā)表了一篇論文，那些斷片才從此有了現(xiàn)在的名字：板塊。同一篇文章稱這種新斷片為“板塊構(gòu)造”。
Old ideas die hard, and not everyone rushed to embrace the exciting new theory. Well into the 1970s, one of the most popular and influential geological textbooks, The Earth by the venerable Harold Jeffreys, strenuously insisted that plate tectonics was a physical impossibility, just as it had in the first edition way back in 1924.
舊的思想很難咽氣，不是人人都馬上接受那種激動人心的新理論。直到20世紀(jì)70年代，一本深受歡迎而又影響很大的、由德高望重的哈羅德·杰弗里斯撰寫的地質(zhì)學(xué)教材，還像1924年初版時那樣，堅(jiān)持認(rèn)為板塊構(gòu)造學(xué)說在物理上不能成立。
