Recently I a feature out in Nature, about how plate tectonics got started on Earth. It's free to read:
Geology's biggest mystery: When did plate tectonics start to reshape Earth?
I want to say a little about how this story originated, for two reasons. First, I thought it might be useful to any aspiring or junior journalists to get a sense of how someone like me (who has been around the block a few times) comes up with ideas. This is one case where it was solely my idea and I can tell you exactly what happened. And second, I can give a little bit of personal context that wasn't appropriate for a reported story.
What happened was this. I have a longstanding interest in palaeontology and the history of the Earth, which of course relates to my fascination with the origin of life - about which I wrote a book called The Genesis Quest that you should all go and read. This includes an interest in what the planet was like when it was young, e.g. when did the crust solidify, when did oceans form. The onset of plate tectonics is a big part of that story.
For years I've seen (and written!) stories that try to pin down when plate tectonics got started. Depending on the type of data they were collecting and the processes they were trying to study, people came up with wildly differing timings - sometimes billions of years apart. So the debate became a matter of "my data's better than your data", or perhaps "my data's more relevant than your data".
In 2022, I wrote a feature for New Scientist about the early geological history of the Earth. This was mostly focused on the early oceans, in particular on the vexed question of when the first exposed land emerged, and what that meant for the origin of life. Here it is (paywalled):
What Earth's mysterious infancy tells us about the origins of life
The story included a short box about the origins of plate tectonics, based largely on a conversation with geologist Nadja Drabon. Her evidence pointed to a multi-part story, in which there were early episodes of subduction that were localised and short-lived, and which gradually built into global plate tectonics. In other words, there was no single switch-on date: it was a process. I wrote this up in about 200 words, and spent most of my time on the oceans question.
Once that feature was done, the idea of a multi-stage onset of plate tectonics lodged itself in my head and wouldn't leave. If this was correct, then all those stories I had read (and written!) pinpointing the origin of plate tectonics were in some crucial sense wrong. Not that the data was wrong, or that the dates identified weren't significant. But the stories were conceptually wrong because they were chasing a single onset date, when that just wasn't what happened.
Naturally, actual geologists were way ahead of me. When I started looking, I found reviews making exactly this kind of argument. It seemed to me that there was a quiet paradigm shift happening in geology: the idea of a single onset of plate tectonics had proved unworkable, so everyone was instead devising multi-step scenarios. And that's the story I pitched to Rich Monastersky at Nature, and which is now published.
It was a challenging story to report, because two contradictory things happened. Some of the geologists I spoke to were, I think, slightly baffled that I was doing it, because what I was saying seemed obvious to them. Meanwhile, the editors at Nature (rightly!) took a certain amount of convincing, because this shift in consensus had happened gradually and there wasn't a clear peg: no single dramatic study that had overturned the previous paradigm. It had crept up on everyone, including me.
I don't know how much cut-through the story will have, but here's the dream. You should never again see a story that is framed around "we found the date when plate tectonics started". The geological community is forming a consensus that there is no such single date. It was a multi-step process. Put another way, the point of the story isn't to say "this is exactly how it happened", but rather "this is the kind of story we need to be telling".
This is, of course, also implicitly about churnalism. If you're a journalist who is constantly writing rapid-turnaround stories with little or no time for reflection or deep reading, you won't be able to grasp slow but crucial trends like this. I'm privileged to be able to do this sort of thing, because the outlets I write for are willing to give me the time and money it takes. Many other journalists aren't so lucky.
Geology's biggest mystery: When did plate tectonics start to reshape Earth?
I want to say a little about how this story originated, for two reasons. First, I thought it might be useful to any aspiring or junior journalists to get a sense of how someone like me (who has been around the block a few times) comes up with ideas. This is one case where it was solely my idea and I can tell you exactly what happened. And second, I can give a little bit of personal context that wasn't appropriate for a reported story.
What happened was this. I have a longstanding interest in palaeontology and the history of the Earth, which of course relates to my fascination with the origin of life - about which I wrote a book called The Genesis Quest that you should all go and read. This includes an interest in what the planet was like when it was young, e.g. when did the crust solidify, when did oceans form. The onset of plate tectonics is a big part of that story.
For years I've seen (and written!) stories that try to pin down when plate tectonics got started. Depending on the type of data they were collecting and the processes they were trying to study, people came up with wildly differing timings - sometimes billions of years apart. So the debate became a matter of "my data's better than your data", or perhaps "my data's more relevant than your data".
In 2022, I wrote a feature for New Scientist about the early geological history of the Earth. This was mostly focused on the early oceans, in particular on the vexed question of when the first exposed land emerged, and what that meant for the origin of life. Here it is (paywalled):
What Earth's mysterious infancy tells us about the origins of life
The story included a short box about the origins of plate tectonics, based largely on a conversation with geologist Nadja Drabon. Her evidence pointed to a multi-part story, in which there were early episodes of subduction that were localised and short-lived, and which gradually built into global plate tectonics. In other words, there was no single switch-on date: it was a process. I wrote this up in about 200 words, and spent most of my time on the oceans question.
Once that feature was done, the idea of a multi-stage onset of plate tectonics lodged itself in my head and wouldn't leave. If this was correct, then all those stories I had read (and written!) pinpointing the origin of plate tectonics were in some crucial sense wrong. Not that the data was wrong, or that the dates identified weren't significant. But the stories were conceptually wrong because they were chasing a single onset date, when that just wasn't what happened.
Naturally, actual geologists were way ahead of me. When I started looking, I found reviews making exactly this kind of argument. It seemed to me that there was a quiet paradigm shift happening in geology: the idea of a single onset of plate tectonics had proved unworkable, so everyone was instead devising multi-step scenarios. And that's the story I pitched to Rich Monastersky at Nature, and which is now published.
It was a challenging story to report, because two contradictory things happened. Some of the geologists I spoke to were, I think, slightly baffled that I was doing it, because what I was saying seemed obvious to them. Meanwhile, the editors at Nature (rightly!) took a certain amount of convincing, because this shift in consensus had happened gradually and there wasn't a clear peg: no single dramatic study that had overturned the previous paradigm. It had crept up on everyone, including me.
I don't know how much cut-through the story will have, but here's the dream. You should never again see a story that is framed around "we found the date when plate tectonics started". The geological community is forming a consensus that there is no such single date. It was a multi-step process. Put another way, the point of the story isn't to say "this is exactly how it happened", but rather "this is the kind of story we need to be telling".
This is, of course, also implicitly about churnalism. If you're a journalist who is constantly writing rapid-turnaround stories with little or no time for reflection or deep reading, you won't be able to grasp slow but crucial trends like this. I'm privileged to be able to do this sort of thing, because the outlets I write for are willing to give me the time and money it takes. Many other journalists aren't so lucky.
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