Apparent polar wander curves (Runcorn)
Curvas de deriva polar aparente (Runcorn)
- Date
- 1956 · confidence high
- Place
- Newcastle upon Tyne, England, United Kingdom
- Credited to
- Keith Runcorn (with Kenneth Creer and Edward Irving)
- Field
- Cosmos & Earth
What was discovered
Runcorn and his colleagues compared the magnetisation direction of rocks of different ages in Europe and North America, and saw that the apparent magnetic pole followed different paths for each continent. The only reasonable explanation was that the continents had moved.
Runcorn published the Europe-North America comparison in 1956; Irving soon produced curves for Australia and India. The curves have since been refined with far more data.
What it led to
- palaeomagnetism as evidence for continental drift
- reconstructions of continental movements