板块构造说的发生与发展

中国是世界文明发达最早的国家之一,中国已有了将近四千年的有文字可考的历史。上古和中古时代我国常常出现光辉的地质思想的萌芽。近古以来,宋明理学盛行,儒家定于一尊,早期出现的可贵苗头,得不到应有的发展。不但地球知识毫无进展,整个自然科学也一蹶不振,长期以来,处于混沌状态。相反,西方在古代漫长黑夜之后,到了十六世纪,所谓“宗教改革”特别是影响深远的“文艺复兴”,为学术的大步前进开辟了道路。

EMERGENCE AND DEVELOPMENT OF PLATE TECTONICS

Traditional geology holds that stable platforms and mobile geosynclines evolve essentially in situ. Vertical movements predominate, horizontal displacements being merely a corollary derived therefrom. Episodic orogenies were separated by long periods of quiescence; each of them occurred simultaneously in different geosynclinal regions of the world. The earth, thus depicted, is composed of stereotyped, horizontally immobile, laterally isolated and mutually independent crustal blocks. The nature and evolution of our highly complicated planet are, to say the least, drastically distorted by geologists of older generations.China learned modern geology from the west and was consequently doomed to hold the same views prevalent in the west. Now, the more and more firmly established plate tectonics begins to shed light on different branches of geology and the latter should deservingly be labelled plate geology. Albeit plate geology is yet in its infant stage of development, a promising future can already be visualized. This overwhelming breakthrough may be compared with that of physics, flourishing since the last decade of the nineteenth century and with that of the recently blooming molecular biology.The plate theory results from the collaboration of a host of sciences and technologies, chiefly geophysics and geology. Further advances require closer collaboration of these and other disciplines in the elucidation of the present state and the origin and evolution of the whole earth, including the solid body, the atmosphere and the hydrosphere. A new and more comprehensive science will emerge from wider and closer collaborations, which should be named geosomatology instead of geonomy. The latter term, beside the equivocal etymology of its second half, may easily be confounded with ’geonemy’, or wrongly affiliated with the greek word ’geonomos’, both bearing quite different meaning, should better be discarded. Traditional geology is a part of natural history, essentially limited in two dimensions of the earth’s surface. The new emerging geology tries to steepen its third dimension and begins to tackle materials beneath the crust and to speculate on the properties of the inner spherical layers of the earth. Traditional geophysics acts in its three dimensions, but is confined to the present day status. Paleomagnetism which begins to enter into the remote geological past, is the first branch of true palegeo-physics, while other branches, lagging for behind, still await further progress.Continental drift-sea floor spreading-plate tectonics-plate geology-geosomato-logy: they mark the big steps of the present century geology in the long march toward a comprehensive understanding of our planet.