Abstract
DURING the last twenty or thirty years, the scientific conceptions of the structure and development of the earth‘s crust have been widely influenced, if not dominated, by the Wegener theory of continental drift and by the idea of orogenetic phases dividing the structural history into short but world-wide times of movement separated by intervals of rest or of mere ‘‘epeirogenetic oscillations. The first theory disrupted the lateral, the second one the vertical (temporal) connexions. But within the same decades, the growth of geological knowledge of nearly all continents, combined with the results of submarine and even of geophysical investigations, pointed in another direction. They led to the conclusion that the major structural zones and units of the earth are much older than they formerly seemed, and that they indicate a long and strong continuity from the very first stages of the globe up to the present. It seems that from early geological time, the crust has been divided into polygonal "fields or blocks of considerable thickness and solidity, and that this primary division formed and orientated the later movements.
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CLOOS, H. Ground Blocks of the Continents and Ocean Bottoms. Nature 161, 71–72 (1948). https://doi.org/10.1038/161071a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/161071a0