Péter Molnár

“For many geologists, the most important consequence of the recognition of plate tectonics was that it brought confirmation of continental drift. As important, plate tectonics allowed continental drift to be determined with considerable precision.
This became immediately clear to Clark Burchfiel, now at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), who in 1968 had carried out fieldwork in Yugoslavia, and returned home to discover Le Pichon’s paper. By knowing the relative motions between Africa and North America and between Europe and North America, Le Pichon had predicted the motion between Africa and Europe for the previous 80 million years, a history that included not only the present-day convergence between Africa and Europe, but also periods when these two regions moved in different directions relative to one another, including a period when they diverged from one another. This history of relative plate motion wrote a complex history on the rock record of the region affected by the relative movement of Africa and Europe. Nevertheless, Burchfiel had inferred from the geologic history of this rock the times of major changes and had inferred what tectonic processes (convergence, divergence, and directions of relative movement) might be occurring at these times. Le Pichon’s calculated plate motions, from data solely in the Atlantic Ocean, predicted many of Burchfiel’s observations and inferences. A new idea becomes believable when it predicts something that has not yet been measured or explained, especially when the idea is really trying to explain other facts.”
― Péter Molnár, Plate Tectonics: A Very Short Introduction