How were the tectonic plates mapped? #science
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The plate map is mostly a mid-century ocean story. Earthquake belts sketched the edges, magnetic stripes on the seafloor showed the crust spreading and flipping polarity, and sonar filled in the ridges and trenches those lines sit on. Wegener had the continents fitting long before anyone could draw the plates themselves. The quiet part of #science is how much of that map was inferred from the seafloor rather than walked on land.
