As early as 1956, oceanographers at Columbia had assembled seismological data suggesting that a remarkable percentage of all earthquakes were occurring in the mid-ocean rifts—a finding that was supported, and then some, after a worldwide system of more than a hundred seismological monitoring stations was established in anticipation of the nuclear-test-ban treaty of 1963. If there was to be underground testing, one had to be able to detect someone else’s tests, so a by-product of the Cold War was seismological data on a scale unapproached before. The whole of plate tectonics, a story of
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