Speaker: Professor W. Jason Morgan (Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Harvard University)

Title: Fifty years of Plate Tectonics

Abstract: In 1967, the ideas of rigid plates and their motions were developed and enunciated.  This talk will be a personal recollection of some of the ideas and people of that time.  I was scheduled to give a talk at the Spring (April) 1967 AGU meeting held in Washington on gravity anomalies at deep-sea trenches and their implications for mantle convection, but seeing the importance of this new idea I did not give my scheduled talk on trenches – instead replacing it with one on plate tectonics. [Background reading]