What did j tuzo wilson discovered gravity

His observations, dubbed "The Wilson Tectonic Cycle," suggested the process occurred many times during Earth's long history, most recently causing the giant supercontinent Pangaea to split into today's seven continents.

Wilson's ideas were central to the so-called Plate Tectonic Revolution, the foundation of contemporary theories for processes underlying mountain-building and earthquakes.

Since his 1967 paper, additional studies have confirmed that large-scale deformation of continents repeatedly occurs in some regions but not others, though the reasons why remain poorly understood.

Now, new findings by Utah State University geophysicist Tony Lowry and colleague Marta Pérez-Gussinyé of Royal Holloway, University of London, shed surprising light on these restless rock cycles.

"It all begins with quartz," says Lowry, who published results of the team's recent study in the March 17 issue of Nature.

The scientists describe a new approach to measuring properties of the deep crust.

It reveals quartz's key role in initiating the churning chain of events that cause Earth's surface to crack, wrinkle, fold and stretch into mountains, plains and valleys.

"If you've ever traveled westward from the Midwest's Great Plains toward the Rocky Mountains, you may have wondered why the flat plains suddenly rise into steep peaks at a particular spot," Lowry says.

"It turns out that the crust beneath the plains has almost no quartz in it, whereas the Rockies are very quartz-rich."

He thinks that those belts of quartz could be the catalyst that sets the mountain-building rock cycle in motion.

"Earthquakes, mountain-building and other expressions of continental tectonics depend on how rocks flow in response to stress," says Lowry.

"We know that tectonics is a response to the effects of gravity, but we know less about rock flow properties and how they change from one location to another."

Wilson's theories provid

Introduction

JOHN TUZO WILSON died in Toronto on 15 April 1993 in his 85th year. Until a few days before his death he manifested the scientific curiosity about our Earth that he had shown for over 60 years, and his energy appeared to be only slightly diminished from his prime. He was one of the most imaginative earth scientists of his time, and the father of academic geophysics in Canada.

Family Background and Early Education

Wilson was born in Ottawa on 24 October 1908, the eldest child of John Armistead and Henrietta (Tuzo) Wilson. To his family he was known as Jack, or Jock, but during his professional career he began to use his middle name to avoid confusion with another J.T. Wilson. As 'Tuzo' he became known internationally and as such he will be referred to here.

His father was a Scottish engineer, born in 1879, with experience in India and western Canada. He met his future bride, Henrietta Tuzo, while on a holiday in Banff, Alberta. They were married in 1907 and shortly afterward moved to Ottawa, where John A. Wilson had accepted a post with the Canadian Government. His initial work was with the Naval Department, but he had a fascination with aeroplanes and in 1918he was given responsibility for developing civil aviation in Canada. This became his lifelong work, until his retirement after the end of World War II. He was to select personally the site of such major airports as those at Montreal (Dorval) and Toronto (Pearson).

The Wilson family hosted visitors with interests in aviation from around the world. Tuzo was later to attribute his insatiable love of travel to the excitement aroused by these early visitors.

Tuzo's mother Henrietta was a remarkable woman, from whom her son inherited a love of the earth and an appreciation of Canadian history. Her father had bee

Although speculative ideas of an expanding Earth can be found before World War II, it was only in the 1950s and 1960s that the theory attracted serious attention among a minority of earth scientists. While some of the proponents of the expanding Earth adopted an empiricist attitude by disregarding the physical cause of the assumed expansion, others argued that the cause, either fully or in part, was of cosmological origin. They referred to the possibility that the gravitational constant was slowly decreasing in time, as first suggested by P. Dirac in 1937. As a result of a stronger gravitation in the past, the ancient Earth would have been smaller than today. The gravitational argument for an expanding Earth was proposed by P. Jordan and L. Egyed in the 1950s and during the next 2 decades it was discussed by several physicists, astronomers and earth scientists. Among those who for a period felt attracted by "gravitational expansionism" were A. Holmes, J. Tuzo Wilson and F. Hoyle. The paper examines the idea of a varying gravitational constant and its impact on geophysics in the period from about 1955 to the mid-1970s.

Received: 04 Feb 2015 – Accepted: 16 Apr 2015 – Published: 05 May 2015

(b. Ottawa, Canada, 24 October 1908;

d. Toronto, Canada, 15 April 1993), geophysics, geology, plate tectonics, transform faults, hot spots.

Wilson’s most significant work involved finding support for continental drift and seafloor spreading, especially with the development of the transform fault concept. He also proposed that groups of linear volcanic islands were caused by mantle plumes, foreshadowing W. Jason Morgan’s idea of hotspots. Wilson led an enormously rich life, as a student traveler attempting to learn geophysics, as a member of the Geological Survey of Canada, as an active researcher at the University of Toronto, as the first principal of the Erindale College, and as director general of the Ontario Science Centre. To avoid confusion with another J. T. Wilson, he used his middle name, and became known professionally as J. Tuzo Wilson or simply Tuzo Wilson.

Education and Early Career. The eldest child of three children of John Armistead and Henrietta Wilson (née Tuzo), Wilson was born in 1908 in Ottawa, Canada. His Scottish father, just sixteen when his own father died, was forced to learn engineering as an apprentice. After contracting malaria in India, he sought a colder climate, settling in Alberta, Canada. Spending most of his professional career working for the Canadian government, he helped develop civil aviation in Canada. Thus, Wilson met many aviators while growing up; he later attributed his love of travel to their influence. Wilson’s mother was born in British Columbia, Canada. Her father, trained as a physician at McGill University in Montreal, joined the Hudson Bay Company in 1853 and traveled with fur traders by canoe to Manitoba, on horseback through the mountains of Alberta, and down the Columbia River by longboat to the Pacific. He died while Wilson’s mother was in medical school, and she had to leave before getting her degree to take care of her own mother. An avid mountain climber, she and her Swiss gui