Transform Plate Boundaries and Fracture Zones

Transform Plate Boundaries and Fracture Zones bridges the gap between the classic plate tectonic theory and new emerging ideas, offering an assessment of the state-of-the-art, pending questions, and future directions in the study of transform plate boundaries and fracture zones. The book includes a number of case studies and reviews on both oceanic and continental tectonic settings.

Transform Plate Boundaries and Fracture Zones is a timely reference for a variety of researchers, including geophysicists, seismologists, structural geologists and tectonicists, as well as specialists in exploration geophysics and natural hazards. This book can also be used as an up-to-date reference at universities in both undergraduate and postgraduate levels.

• Reviews ideas and concepts about transform plate boundaries and fracture zones
• Includes a variety of case studies on both oceanic and continental settings
• Addresses innovative and provocative ideas about the activity of fracture zones and transform faults and their impacts to the human society

• Language: English
• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Release date: Sep 25, 2018
• ISBN: 9780128122464

Book preview

Turkey

Preface

João C. Duarte

Transform plate boundaries are one of the three types of plate boundaries required for plate tectonics to operate. They are also known as conservative plate boundaries as in these locations plates move laterally in relation to each other without significant creation or destruction of plate material. The discovery of transform plate boundaries played a fundamental role in the development of the theory of plate tectonics, the grand unifying theory of the solid earth sciences. The concept of a tectonic plate was introduced in 1965 by the Canadian geoscientist Tuzo Wilson (Tuzo Wilson, 1965) after identifying what he called a new class of faults: transform faults. This was the final piece of a puzzle that allowed connecting ridges to orogenic belts and subduction zones and closed the circumference of lithospheric plates. Wilson immediately recognized that transform faults were different from the already known continental transcurrent faults (or nonlithospheric strike-slip faults). He understood that they constituted a new type of plate boundary that connected other tectonic boundaries. In this volume, the term transform plate boundary is generically used to define a lithospheric strike-slip fault or fault zone that constitutes a plate boundary. The term is also sometimes used more loosely to define strike-slip boundaries of more diffuse tectonic blocks or microplates.

There have been several review papers on transform faults (e.g., Gerya, 2012, 2016; Norris and Toy, 2014). However, there has been no comprehensive volume dealing with transform plate boundaries and fracture zones, especially when compared to the vast literature on the other types of plate boundaries. It is therefore timely to put together a volume focusing on transform plate boundaries and fracture zones. The idea is not to exhaust the subject, but instead to offer the reader an overview of the state of the knowledge and to provide examples on what is currently being done. Many observations and new ideas are arising every day. New endeavors in the exploration of the deep sea will certainly reveal new fascinating aspects of these intriguing and largely unexplored tectonic features. We hope this book to be a starting point for future works.

The idea to put together this volume came from several activities in which I have participated over the last few years. Namely, three EGU sessions on transform plate boundaries that ran in 2016, 2017, and 2018 and the EU-funded project FLOWS (https://www.flows-cost.eu/). Later, already during the development of the volume, an InterRidge Working Group on Ocean Transform Faults was created, which included several authors from this book. New exciting endeavors are ahead to come.

I would also like to make some acknowledgments. First of all, I would like to deeply thank all the authors. Without them this volume would of course not have been possible. It was great to work with all of them. I really learned a lot and I am sure the readers will too. I would also like to acknowledge the Elsevier team. They were all outstanding. In particular, Marisa LaFleur who encouraged me to develop this book, and Carly Demetre who did a magnificent work managing this volume. I thank them for having always believed in this project. It was a pleasure to work with both of them. I would also like to acknowledge my main institution, the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon, and the Instituto Dom Luiz (IDL), for always providing me a lot of freedom to develop different projects. In particular, the former head of IDL, Pedro Miranda, and our research manager Célia Lee. I thank them for all the support. Likewise, my acknowledgments to Monash University who welcomed me as a postdoc and provided me with the tools to grow as a scientist. In particular, I would like to thank Wouter Schellart, my former postdoc supervisor, who has been a great mentor. My deep acknowledgments to my former PhD supervisors Filipe Rosas and Pedro Terrinha and all their support and guidance over the years. Many thanks to Nicolas Riel, Christian Hensen, Marc-André Gutscher, António Ribeiro, Susanne Buiter, Taras Gerya, Jason Morgan, Chris MacLeod, Paola Vannucchi, Vincent Strak, Luís Pinheiro, Luis Batista, Marta Neres, Susana Custódio, Luis Matias, Michael Lazar, Marcia Maia, Celâl Şengör, Thorne Lay, Sandy Cruden, David Boutelier, Zhihao Chen, Jaime Almeida, Hannah Davies, among many others, with whom I have discussed some of these topics and ideas over the years, directly or indirectly, and who have contributed to the success of this book.

Last but not least, I would like to acknowledge my family. In particular, my father for passing me his love for knowledge and books and my mother for having taught me that persistence and hard work always pays off. Also, my sister Helena and my nephews Pedro and Diogo for all their love and support. Finally, I would like to thank my lovely wife Noémie Wouters. Putting together a book comes out with a great cost of many working hours and stressful moments. I did it with pleasure, but I could not have done it without her support and strength.

References

Gerya T. Origin and models of oceanic transform faults. Tectonophysics. 2012;522:34–54.

Gerya T.V. Origin, evolution, seismicity, and models of oceanic and continental transform boundaries. Plate Boundaries and Natural Hazards. 2016;pp. 39–76.

Norris R.J., Toy V.G. Continental transforms: a view from the Alpine Fault. J. Struct. Geol. 2014;64:3–31.

Wilson J.T. A new class of faults and their bearing on continental drift. Nature. 1965;207:343–347.

Chapter 1

Franz Lotze and the Origin of the Idea of Transform Faulting in Central Europe

A.M. Celâl Şengör⁎,†    ⁎ İTÜ, Faculty of Mines, Department of Geology, İstanbul, Turkey

† İTÜ Eurasia Institute of Earth Sciences, İstanbul, Turkey

Abstract

The idea of transform faulting, i.e., strike-slip faulting penetrating the lithosphere and connecting two other areas of deformation by transforming the motion along them, originated in Central Europe in 1937, where a number of independent blocks move with respect to one another and are separated by convergent, divergent, and strike-slip boundaries. The idea was already implicit in Eduard Suess’ Die Entstehung der Alpen (1875), where he likened the motion of the Central European blocks to floes in drifting pack ice, but it was Franz Lotze's monumental 1937 paper on the methodology of investigating what his teacher Hans Stille had called Saxonikum that explicitly spelled it out and illustrated in figures. Lotze's figures correspond one-to-one with those by J. Tuzo Wilson in his famous 1965 paper that introduced the term transform fault and inaugurated plate tectonics, although it is almost certain that Wilson was unaware of Lotze's paper. This is an instance of rediscovering the wheel in geology and clinches the argument that science does come into contact with reality, as Popper had argued, and that our scientific hypotheses are not just personal whims as Thomas Kuhn would have wanted us to believe. Science progresses because it comes into contact with reality.

Keywords

Polybius; Eastern Alps; Central Europe; Franz Lotze; Alpine Foreland

Outline

1Introduction

2Post-Hercynian Tectonics of Central Europe

3Franz Lotze and the Motion of the Blocks (Schollen) in the Alpine Foreland

4Lotze and Wilson: Rediscovery of the Wheel and Its Implications

5Conclusions

References

Further Reading

I have long discovered that geologists never read each others works, & that the only object in writing a Book is a proof of earnestness & that you do not form your opinions without undergoing labor of some kind. Geology is at present very oral, & what I here say is to a great extent quite true.

Charles DARWIN to John Maurice HERBERT,

September 3, 1846.

1 Introduction

Polybius (2nd century BCE) famously pointed out that history repeats itself, although the idea seems so obvious that it appears to have occurred also to people not familiar with the great Greek historian in places as far away as seventh century (CE) China. Hegel believed that historical events occur twice and Marx added, mockingly, Yes, first as tragedy, second time as comedy! Yet sensible professional historians would disagree and rightly so. For example, most recently historian Moshik Temkin of Harvard wrote in a wonderful op-ed article in the New York Times (June 26, 2017) entitled Historians shouldn’t be pundits that …history has much to teach us. But one of its lessons is its own limits: Things rarely repeat themselves. Just because Mr. Trump's lies and evasions bear some similarity to those of Richard Nixon, that doesn’t mean that we’re watching a repeat of Watergate. This makes sense: human affairs are so complex that it is statistically improbable that they would recur exactly (see, especially, Popper, 1964, pp. 3–12 and 110–113¹). Yet in science certain discoveries repeat each other so precisely that we become convinced that they are about the same things in Nature and that their makers have managed to grab a piece of reality. Some refer to such repetitions disparagingly as rediscovering the wheel, yet they are precious. They result from the absence of a perfectly efficient market in scientific intercourse. We are lucky that this is so. If repeated discoveries are not plagiarisms, their makers are entitled to the same honors and they document for us that our discoveries are not our personal whims, that they actually represent a piece of reality. History of science is, among others, about such instances. Investigating the instances of rediscovering the wheel is not empty precursorism, but about understanding the nature of the scientific enterprise (e.g., Şengör, 2003, 2005). Discoveries of the same things at about the same time by independent researchers belong to this category (for a case from geology, see Le Pichon, 1991). The importance of rediscovery of the wheel for understanding the nature of the growth of scientific knowledge has never been discussed in any length in any of the treatises devoted to the philosophy of the geological sciences (e.g., Routhier, 1969; Kitts, 1977; von Engelhardt and Zimmermann, 1982; Galopim de Carvalho, 2014). I have not seen it being discussed elsewhere either. Yet it is an extremely important process that almost proves the point that natural sciences do come into contact with the reality of Nature. Science may be fostered socially, but its results are not social constructs.

The purpose of this paper is to document another case of rediscovering the wheel by two great geologists and, so far as I can tell, entirely independent of each other. It concerns the discovery of transform faults, a term J. Tuzo Wilson introduced in a celebrated paper that also inaugurated the theory of plate tectonics (Wilson, 1965). The same idea (transform faults, not plate tectonics), however, had been already published in 1937 by the German geologist Franz Lotze (Fig. 1) and in a paper bearing illustrations of the concept that correspond one-to-one to those in Wilson's paper. Lotze's paper was published in the Geotektonische Forschungen, the house journal of Hans Stille's Institute of Geology and Paleontology (Geologisch-Paläontologisches Institut) at the University of Berlin (at the time Friedrich-Wilhelm-Universität) before the war (Lotze, 1937).

Fig. 1 Franz Lotze (1903–1971).

Because Lotze's discovery happened in Central Europe, where a peculiar block tectonics (= Schollentektonik expressed as germanotype Tektonik), called, locally, saxonische Tektonik by Hans Stille, has dominated since the end of the Hercynian Orogeny during the early Permian, it might be helpful for the reader to be made familiar with its outlines in the following section (see also Richter-Bernburg, 1977; Kley, 2013).

2 Post-Hercynian Tectonics of Central Europe

Fig. 2 shows a tectonic map of Central Europe illustrating the main elements of what has been called Saxonikum by Hans Stille and his students. Notice that the entire Alpine foreland is divided into blocks of various sizes which abut against each other along narrow zones of deformation characterized by shortening, extensional, or strike-slip boundaries as shown by the cross sections 1–15. This peculiar structure had already been sensed by Eduard Suess in 1873. On July 24, 1873 he read a paper to the Academy of Sciences in Vienna, the abstract of which was published in the Gazette of the Academy (Anzeiger der Akademie der Wissenschaften). This abstract is of such great importance not only for our subject, but also for the entire history of tectonics that I quote it here in full (in my translation from the German; written in the third person, but I am sure Suess wrote it himself and gave it to the secretary of his class in the Academy to be published):

The full member Professor Suess presented a paper with the title On the Structure of the Middle European high mountains. It was first shown that the opinion prevailing until now about the symmetrical structure of the high mountains and their uplifting through a central axis is no longer defensible because of many reasons, especially because a detailed study shows that with the exception of a small part of the Alps and perhaps the southernmost part of the Italian peninsula, southern marginal zones do not exist in the Middle European mountain chains. The newer explanations, based on the one-sidedness of mountains, such as those of Dana and Mallet, correspond better to the circumstances, but are still not sufficient. The Alps do not fork in the inlet of Graz, as commonly said, instead the Middle European Mountains constitute, in their entirety from the Apennine to the Carpathians, a group of mountains that follow each other in the form of a fan. They exhibit regular folds towards the north or towards the northeast, but on the opposite side they show fields of extension and subsidence, volcanic constructions and earthquakes.

The first of these chains that follow each other in the form of a fan is the Italian Peninsula; Dalmatia with the Karst and the Bosnian mountains form the second group; the more or less east-west striking Croatian and then the Styrian chains constitute the third group; the next is already the southwest striking Bakony Forest and finally the last is the great chain of the Carpathians.

The Jura and the Swabian Alb are also such chains.

The trends of all of these mountains depend on the position of the older massifs and the way they are dammed against the old massifs can be recognised not only in the French Jura, in the Swiss Jura along the southern margin of the Black Forest, or in the course of the anticlines of the Austrian limestone zone south of the Bohemian Massif, but also the whole arc-shaped surrounding of the individual chains of the Western Alps, the unity of which was recognised by Desor as a consequence of damming.

If one regards the old massifs of Sardinia with Corsica and the Hyères, that of Central France, Central Germany and Bohemia as islands and imagines that a sea fills the space around them in which a flood wave originates in the southwest, so the trend of this wave would be entirely similar to those of the great mountain chains.

The old mountains themselves seem to trend locally and to follow a similar direction, such as Riesen- and Erzgebirge. Far in the east, the mountain chains seem to obey similar laws, such as the Balkan, the trachytes of which had already been compared with the basalts of the Riesengebirge, with the trachytes of the Carpathians and with the volcanoes of Italy by Hochstetter. Also the Caucasus with the block at the southern point of the Crimea.

The author came to the conclusion that the entire surface of the Earth is in a state of general but very slow and heterogeneous motion, which, in Europe, between the 40th and the 50th latitudes, is directed to the northeast or to the north-northeast. The so-called old massifs move more slowly than the regions lying between them, which form chains that are dammed up. In Middle Europe, on the polar side, regular folds are built and on the equatorial side tears are produced.

This peculiar movement of the surface of the Earth behaves, with respect to the rest of the planet, like the so-called peculiar movement of the Sun spots with respect to the rotation of the entire body of the Sun. Their direction in various parts of the Earth are also various.

(Suess 1873, pp. 130–131).

Fig. 2 Cainozoic structures in the Saxonikum of Hans Stille (modified from Şengör, 1995, Fig. 2.10). All structures shown were active at some time during the Cainozoic, although they originated at different times ranging from the latest Permian to the Cainozoic. As a rule most northwest-southeast striking fault systems originated during the latest Paleozoic as right-lateral strike-slip faults and were reactivated during the Mesozoic mainly as right-lateral strike-slip faults until they all became transpressional in the late Cretaceous to the present. The north-northeast trending basins mostly formed during the late Jurassic and the early Cainozoic. Most remained as extensional or transtensional structures to the present. Many structures in the Alpine foreland played more than one, not uncommonly contradictory, rôles during their history, even within the Cainozoic. Alkalic vulcanicity accompanied some of the structures shown.

This is an amazing text! Here Suess says that on Earth there are pieces of rocky rind that move independent of each other in a horizontal sense and that when they move with respect to other blocks, convergent boundaries, between a moving and a hindering block (Suess called the hindering blocks damming masses = stauende Massen) create folded mountains and divergent boundaries create basins of subsidence often accompanied by vulcanicity. In this text there is as yet no mention of strike-slip boundaries. Only 2 years later, in his classic Die Entstehung der Alpen (= the Origin of the Alps) he likened the motions of the blocks in Central Europe to that of floes in drifting pack ice. This analogy inevitably implies strike-slip boundaries. He wrote:

But these damming masses themselves are of two kinds. Europe provides a clear example for them. In places, as in Bohemia, they are pushed upon one another and build criss-crossing mountains, similar to pack-ice. In other places they consist of wide surfaces, the beds of which, even the oldest, have retained their horizontality, as in the great Russian block …

(Suess 1875, p. 156)

Here we see the distinction between narrow boundaries of deformation and essentially undeformed large blocks between them being introduced for the first time (in 1873 he had confined his attention to the small blocks in Central Europe). The idea of strike-slip faulting is as yet only implicit in the pack-ice analogy.

Suess was also the discoverer of major strike-slip faulting on Earth (Şengör, 2008; although small strike-slip faults were known to miners since at least the 18th century). Already in the first volume of Das Antlitz der Erde (Face of the Earth) he discussed dislocations that accompany and steer the motion of independently moving blocks of the lithosphere. Normal faults had been long known and Suess ascribed them to stretching and subsidence. Up- and overthrusts were results of shortening. Yet there seemed to exist a third class of dislocations that had thus far received little attention and that is why lacked a name of its own. Suess wanted to fill this gap and chose his examples from the Alps and their foreland:

In the eastern Alps the effects of these vertical planes of dislocation on mountain structure may be followed in every stage, from the dislocation of great mountain segments on both sides of a transverse valley down to the displacement along an ore-bearing strike-slip fault, only a few metres in amount, or finally to divisional planes in the limestone, which appear as simple cracks no wider than a hair; and these last appear to play a similar part in the mountains to that of the far smaller glide plains which the microscope reveals in contorted rocks.

Examples are not wanting in other regions; the Medina fault along which one half of the Isle of Wight has been displaced against the other is an instructive case. That these surfaces as well as the thrust planes, are the result of tangential stresses, need no further proof; they possess no distinctive name.

(Suess 1883, pp. 158–159)

Suess suggested calling them Blatt (= leaf), borrowing an old Alpine miner's term. Sollas translated them into English as flaw (Suess, 1883, English translation, p. 120, footnote 3). Today, we call them strike-slip faults.

In the last scientific paper he wrote, Suess (1913) discussed the importance of such strike-slip faults for the deformation pattern in the Alpine foreland. He began his discussion with a hand specimen of a banded limestone (Bänderkalk) from the Oßelitzen-Graben in Carinthia (Fig. 3). He says think of the orogenic force A acting perpendicularly to the surface a. He then says that B and C are nothing but the components resolved along the surfaces b and c according to the parallelogram rule. On this picture Suess shows only the normal stresses, not the shear stresses, but his mention of the parallelogram rule implies that he was aware of them. Fig. 4 shows his application of this idea to the strike-slip faults in St. Andreasberg in the Harz Mountains. This is how he thought Europe was divided into blocks by the Alpine push.

Fig. 3 Hand specimen of a striped limestone from Carinthia illustrated in Suess (1913). See text for discussion.

Fig. 4 Strike-slip faults near St. Andreasberg in the Harz Mountains (from Suess, 1883). Suess thought they were one typical representative of the block boundaries in the Alpine foreland.

This insight was, however, soon lost. In fact, the loss had happened already before Suess published his last paper, because most of his contemporaries did not even understand what he was saying. Stille (1910a, b), for example, thought that the European foreland was as much a foldbelt as any other, only that it was characterized by fault folds (= Bruchfalten).² This was a huge step backward, back into the middle of the 19th century, to the interpretations of Élie de Beaumont (1852) and in Dufrénoy and Elie de Beaumont (1848). Stille interpreted everything as shortening along folds and some upthrusts. He tried to explain even the normal faults he had recognized through impossible models dominated by shortening (cf. Şengör, 2018). However, his students, mapping around Göttingen, convinced him that his ideas did not hold water and that Suess was essentially right (for the results of this mapping activity, see Preußische Geologische Landesanstalt, 1931, 1932; Stille, 1922a, 1923–1925, 1930a, b; Stille and Lotze, 1937, 1938, 1940). One important result of their activity was a splendid tectonic overview map of Saxonian Mountain-Building (Übersichtskarte der Saxonischen Gebirgsbildung: Stille, 1922a: Fig. 5). It was this mapping activity that led one of Stille's Students, Franz Lotze (1903–1971; for biographies, see Radig and Rosenfeld, 1963; Schmidt and Rosenfeld, 1971), to the discovery of the idea of transform faulting.

Fig. 5 Tectonic map of the Saxonian mountain-building prepared by Hans Stille on the basis of his own and his students’ mapping around Göttingen ( Stille, 1922a). For its location in central Europe, see Fig. 2.

3 Franz Lotze and the Motion of the Blocks (Schollen) in the Alpine Foreland

In two papers Lotze (1931, 1932) showed that the motion of individual blocks with respect to one another was difficult to reconcile with the idea of an all-sided shortening as would be expected from the alleged thermal contraction of the globe as defended by his teacher Hans Stille (1922b, 1924). In his study of the Falkenhagen zone of dislocation emanating from the Teutoburg Forest toward the east-northeast he emphasized that the faults in this system were not simply secondary elements of a zone of folding expressed by the subsidences (alleged dejective synclines) as Stille had earlier maintained, but the faults themselves were the primary elements and the subsidences were only their accompanying phenomena (Stille accepted Lotze's interpretation: see Stille, 1932, p. 175 and fig. 4). His paper on the Falkenhagen Fault System of 1931 contains a discussion of the Entrup-Löwendorf fault system in which Lotze noticed that extension in the west gradually dies out eastward and across what he called a neutral point (Lotze, 1931, p. 79) shortening structures take over. He pointed out at the end of his paper that the entire system indicated a series of neutral points exhibiting a picture of a northern block rotating clockwise with respect to a southern block. He illustrated this with a diagram (Fig. 6A).

Fig. 6 (A) Blocks rotating around a neutral point. From Lotze (1931, p. 104, fig. 41; 1937, p. 17. fig. 9). (B) Kinematics of the Eichenberg Graben knot. From Lotze (1932, p. 40, figs. 28 and 29; 1937, p. 21, fig. 15). (C) Two strike-slip faults connecting a zone of divergence with a zone of convergence, thereby moving the block bounded by them to the right with respect to its surroundings (from Lotze, 1937, p. 20, fig. 12). (D) A block surrounded by two extensional and two shortening boundaries whereby all have a strike-slip component. We would now say two transtensional and two transpressional boundaries surround the block making it move to the right and under with respect to its surroundings (from Lotze, 1937, p. 20, fig. 13). (E) An extensional structure in limestones. Lotze (1937, p. 20, fig. 14) called it a staircase-like stretching zone. It consists of horizontal sliding surfaces (a) and vertical stretching fractures (b). (F) Blocks rotating around a transform point. From Wilson (1965, p. 344, fig. 2D). (G) A ridge-ridge-ridge (RRR) triple junction (from McKenzie and Morgan, 1969, p. 127, fig. 3). (H) A ridge-trench transform fault (from Wilson, 1965, p. 344, fig. 3b). (I) A ridge-ridge transform fault (from Wilson, 1965, p. 344, fig. 3A).

In his next paper, this time dealing with the Leinetal-Graben, in which the city of Göttingen lies, Lotze illustrated a triple junction at the southern end of the structure, which he termed the Eichenberg Graben Knot (Fig. 7). He also illustrated the relative motion around this triple junction (Fig. 6B).

Fig. 7 Eichenberg Graben knot (from Lotze, 1932, p. 7 fig. 1).

The complex kinematics of the relatively rigid blocks along the well-defined narrow zones of dislocation forced Lotze to think of the mechanical characteristics of rigid substances. But the motions were not to be brought into agreement with any sort of unidirectional or even multidirectional (even all-sided) shortening as required by his teacher Stille's model of thermal contraction as the main engine of terrestrial tectonics. Lotze found a way out in Stille's own statement that in addition to thermal contraction

Other, secondary causes of motion are to be considered. Undercurrents, even if caused by deep contraction, could also play a rôle…

(Stille 1922b, p. 23)

So, Lotze (1932) thought that undercurrents below the lithosphere could be making the blocks to drift. He wrote:

It seems easier to explain the picture with the assumption that the motion of the blocks is imposed onto them from below, that they drift away.

(Lotze 1932, p. 46, emphasis Lotze’s).

It is extremely interesting that Lotze emphasized the word drift! By imposing motion onto the blocks from below, he also implied that the block boundaries reached down beyond the zone of brittle deformation, i.e., beyond the lithosphere at least according to the seismic definition of the lithosphere, into the zone of flowage, i.e., into the asthenosphere.

Thus, by the end of 1932, it had become clear to Franz Lotze that his teacher Hans Stille's model of thermal contraction as the main driver of terrestrial tectonics did not hold water, at least not in the Alpine foreland. The blocks into which that foreland was divided seemed to be moving independently. Lotze thought they had to be driven from below to explain the kinematics he saw at the surface. It is further interesting that he seemed unaware of Eduard Suess’ earlier similar ideas about the same area. I think this was because Stille had drilled into his students that Suess had got it all wrong.

In 1937, in the first issue of the new house journal of their institute, Geotektonische Forschungen, Stille and Lotze, as editors of the journal, decided to make a special issue on germanotype tectonics, i.e., the tectonics of the Alpine foreland. In it Lotze decided to write a methodological paper to explain how the tectonics of the block population is to be studied. After having discussed a few epistemological points, he came to evaluation (Auswertung) of the data gathered. This he divided into two: kinematics and dynamics. The kinematic considerations were further divided into two sections: internal kinematics and external kinematics. Internal kinematics was to deal with the structures forming in the zones of deformation. External kinematics, however, was to analyze the motion of the blocks so as to obtain a general field of motion in the entire area. What Lotze wrote and illustrated under this heading is so important and so widely ignored that I thought it is appropriate to cite him here full, in my own translation from his original German:

2. The total motion of a block.

The study of the processes of movement along one zone of deformation gives us the motion of a block relative to a neighbouring block. But to obtain a picture of the total motion of a block, corresponding studies must be undertaken along all block boundaries. If the neighbouring areas of a block remain stationary with respect to one another, then the movement picture along the individual block boundaries would display regular differences. It can be, as shown in fig. 12 [herein Fig. 6C], that one margin of the block can display a divergent motion, the opposite margin a convergent motion and the other two parallel motions. In the case of fig. 13 [herein Fig. 6D] there are two zones of extension and two zones of shortening. Despite this the total motion of the block with respect to the surroundings taken to be fixed is really simple; in case of fig. 12 simple easterly, in case of fig. 13 simple southeasterly motion… The situation becomes more complicated when the surrounding blocks are moving with respect to one another. Then one has to choose one block and take it as fixed and relate the motions of all others to it. One needs to choose a block that would give the simplest picture of relative movements. In general this could be the largest of the blocks.

We thus see that the dislocation pattern is essentially dependent on the position of the block boundaries with respect to the main motion. As an illustration let me point out another example taken from small structures (fig. 14 [herein Fig. 6D]). In a zone of extension broad calcite veins in limestones form perpendicular to the direction of motion, whereas bed boundaries parallel to the direction of motion display horizontal motion shown by striations.

Further complications can ensue in the kinematic picture, where the moving blocks rotate or tilt in addition to being translated. Then from the combination of local movements locally the most complicated kinematics can emerge.

3. The total motion of the Saxon block system.

Further synthesis leads from the motions of individual blocks to the general kinematic picture of Saxony. But this is an objective, from which we are as yet very far. We make an overview of the motion mechanism first of small individual areas. Thus, the next task becomes to round this picture up by means of further studies. Our job will be complete when we can see in the form of a motion picture the entire deformational and motion pattern of the whole of Saxony, the initial division of the ground into blocks, the motion of the blocks, and the new deformations caused by these.

Without doubt this motion pattern can be spatially varied and temporally changeable in detail in terms of the sense of the motions. Despite that, it is to be hoped that the general picture of movements can be formulated with a simple fundamental expression. My own studies have shown that in the southern part of the Leinetal Graben near Göttingen (Eichenberg Graben knot), that the blocks have first moved perpendicular to the Hercynian [i.e., west-northwest] and the anti-Hercynian (rheinic in the large sense; i.e., north-northeast) direction only to approach each other again in the Hercynian direction but to continue diverging along the anti-Hercynian direction (fig. 15 [herein Fig. 6B]). Already then it was thought that the same rule would apply to other Saxonian areas, especially to those with rheinic and Hercynian Graben zones and in fact the studies by Martini (1937) and Lemcke (1937) led to corroborating results regarding the conditions in Niederhessen. But we need still further studies to be able to derive a fundamental rule of the Saxonian tectonics in general.

(Lotze 1937, pp. 19–21, emphases by Lotze)

This text, with the accompanying illustrations (Figs. 6A–E herein) leaves nothing to be desired to proclaim Lotze as the discoverer of the kinematic rules of what we today call plate tectonics. He did not apply his discovery to the Earth as a whole, nor did he know anything about subduction or seafloor spreading. That is why he is not called the discoverer of plate tectonics, yet the kinematic rules he outlined are precisely the ones we use today for plate tectonics. Although Wilson said that

transform faults can only exist if there is crustal displacement and proof of their existence would go far towards establishing the reality of continental drift

(Wilson 1965, p. 347)

His statement proved overly optimistic. Without the spreading centers and the subduction zones, continental drift could not be accepted. Even the statements and a critical figure published in 1937 by the Dutch geophysicist Hendrik Petrus Berlage Jr. (1896–1968) proved to be of no help. Berlage used Simon Willem Visser's (1884–1963), responsible for seismology in the Royal Observatory in Batavia (now Jakarta), hypocenter data in the Netherlands East Indies to plot the isobaths of the inclined seismic zones. In the same year his scheme was criticized by his countryman Gerard Leonard Smit Sibinga (1895–1963, Fig. 8), who argued that the data in fact required three sets of inclined seismic zones, two dipping toward Asia and one toward the Pacific Ocean. Smit Sibinga considered these severed from one another along transverse faults. The way he drew them requires that at least the one below southern Mindanao functions as a transform fault (Fig. 9). Yet no one thought of connecting the Dutch observations in the East Indies with others from Europe and the Atlantic Ocean, perhaps because Visser had criticized Berlage's figure saying that the data were not robust enough to be sure of the depths of the hypocenters. That is why Lotze's brilliant insights became forgotten and could not be revived until Wilson's rediscovery within the context of spreading centers and subduction zones.

Fig. 8 Gerard Leonard Smit Sibinga (1895–1963).

Fig. 9 Smit Sibinga's 1937 depiction of the geometry of the inclined zones in Southeast Asia. The one functioning definitely as a transform fault is indicated by me.

4 Lotze and Wilson: Rediscovery of the Wheel and Its Implications

Fig. 6 shows a comparison of Lotze's figures from his 1937 (Figs. 6A–E) paper with those from Wilson's 1965 paper (Figs. 6F–I) and the one-to-one correspondence is striking. It is clear that both thought about precisely the same kinematic rules governing the motion of rigid blocks with respect to one another. Lotze had no spreading centers and no subduction zones, but instead he had zones of extension, i.e., divergence and zones of shortening, i.e., convergence. He tied the two zones together via strike-slip faults reaching down into the zone where undercurrents operated to move the blocks in a horizontal sense, thus corresponding precisely to Wilson's transform faults. Lotze's neutral point in Fig. 6A corresponds precisely to Wilson's transform point in Fig. 6F.

I am almost certain that Wilson had no knowledge of Lotze's work. Then how did he come to the same precise picture? Fig. 10 gives the answer. Already as a contractionist, Wilson was thinking in terms of the motions of rigid blocks on the face of the Earth with respect to one another and, moreover, he was not the first to do so. Ketin in his seminal 1948 paper announcing the discovery of the North Anatolian Fault emphasized the paucity of earthquakes within an Anatolian block bounded by the North Anatolian Fault to the north (Ketin, 1948). He said that either the whole of Africa was drifting westward with respect to Eurasia along the fault, or that another fault had to exist to the south delimiting the Anatolian block. The corresponding East Anatolian Fault was discovered in 1972 (Arpat and Şaroğlu, 1972; Seymen and Aydın, 1972; McKenzie, 1976), after it broke during the Bingöl earthquake of May 22, 1971 with a magnitude of 6.7 on the Richter scale. Although Ketin had been trained in Germany, I do not recall him ever mentioning reading Lotze's papers when he and I discussed the history of his discovery when I was his assistant and then colleague in the same institute (being a Cloos student, Ketin never entertained a very high opinion of Stille or his school). Wellman (1955) too recognized that the Alpine Fault in New Zealand joined trenches with opposite polarities and was lengthening as a result (see also Dewey, 2016, p. 283).

Fig. 10 The tectonics of Southwest Pacific after Wilson (1954, p. 179, Fig. 16). Notice the motion of rigid blocks and how the structures north of New Guinea show the deformational result (structures oblique to the boundary between the Pacific and Australia) of the vector addition of the two motion vectors of the Pacific and Australia with respect to Asia, taken as relatively fixed block.

Since Wilson was already moving rigid blocks on the surface of the Earth even as a contractionist, it was easy for him to invent the plate tectonic theory. Late John Rodgers of Yale once told me that Wilson's inspiration was Sam Warren Carey. In the 25th Anniversary symposium of plate tectonics in 1987 at Texas A & M I asked Wilson whether that was true. He said it was not. He said his main inspiration came from Hess’ seminal 1962 paper. Once the obstacle in front of moving the continents was removed it was easy for the block pusher Wilson to see how the entire surface of the Earth would move in plates.

Already in 1910 Taylor had thought in terms of the motion of rigid blocks on the surface of the globe (Fig. 11) in a manner not dissimilar to Lotze’s. Wegener (1915, p. 62) also used the Nares Strait offset and so did Wilson (1965, p. 344, Fig. 5).³ When Charles Schuchert wanted to test Wegener's reconstructions rigorously, he used transparent plasticine globe segments that he rotated around a pole (Schuchert, 1928a, b).⁴ In 1943 Argand's doctoral student, later assistant and eventual successor C. Eugene Wegmann went back to Taylor's idea to reconstruct the pre-drift situation in the North Atlantic and the Arctic (Wegmann, 1943). But the most remarkable contribution came from Guyot (1943) who pointed out, upon Wegmann's instigation, that the best way to study the motion of rigid surfaces on the face of the Earth is to choose a projection that will turn small circles on the globe to straight lines while conserving the angular relationships. He showed that an oblique Mercator projection would do the job. In 1967 it was precisely that projection that McKenzie and Parker (1967) used to test Wilson's theory of plate tectonics using the earthquake slip vectors.

Fig. 11 Tectonics of the Northwestern Atlantic (from Taylor, 1910). Compare this with Lotze's and Wilson's figures.

Perhaps everything is indeed as Mark Twain (1867, p. 64) once remarked: no occurrence is sole and solitary, but is merely a repetition of a thing which has happened before, and perhaps often. The key here is to know what constitutes the occurrence and the thing.

5 Conclusions

Many ideas now incorporated into plate tectonics have been around since almost the beginning of the 20th century—some are even older. Geologists have repeatedly reinvented the wheel. As long as there is no plagiarism involved, there is nothing to be deplored, but, on the contrary, it gives us confidence that we do come into contact with reality outside us, that more than one person, independent of each other, see the very same thing.

One of the recent fads in the historiography and philosophy of science is that scientific knowledge is constructed socially and that it is essentially uninfluenced by observations. People who hold this extraordinary view are members of social-study groups referred to as science, technology, and society studies, or simply science and culture studies (e.g., Kuhn, 1970, but see 2000, esp. chs. 4 and 5; Collins, 1981; Latour and Woolgar, 1986; Bernal, 1987, 1991; Feyerabend, 1988, 1991; Bloor, 1991). With few exceptions, natural scientists have been oblivious to these developments and when confronted with them, laugh them off. Repeated rediscovery of the wheel in diverse branches of the natural sciences show how right they are in laughing off the entirely unsubstantiated, nay, silly, ideas of the so-called science, technology, and society studies, or simply the science and culture studies. This paper documents yet another case of two outstanding geologists noticing the very same thing in Nature entirely independent of each other in the discovery of what Wilson ended up calling transform faults.

References

Arpat E., Şaroğlu F. The East Anatolian Fault system: thoughts on its development. Bull. Miner. Res. Explor. Inst. 1972;78:33–39.

Bernal M. Black Athena—The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, v. I: The Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1785–1985. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press; 1987 xxxii + 575 pp.

Bernal M. Black Athena—The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, v. II: The Archeological and Documentary Evidence. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press; 1991 xxxiii + 736 pp.

Bloor D. Knowledge and Social Imagery. second ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; 1991.203.

Collins H. Stages in the empirical program of relativism. Social Stud. Sci. 1981;11:3–10.

Dawes P.R. The Nyeboe Land fault zone: a major dislocation on the Greenland coast along northern Nares Strait. In: Dawes P.R., Kerr J.W., eds. Nares Strait and the Drift of Greenland: A Conflict of Plate Tectonics: Meddelelser om Grønland, Geoscience. 177–192. 1982;8.

Dewey J.F. Marking 50 years of the Wilson Cycle—Tuzo Wilson: an appreciation on the 50th anniversary of his 1966 paper. Geosci. Canada. 2016;43:283–285.

Dufrénoy P.-A., Elie de Beaumont L. Explication de la Carte Géologique de la France, rédigée sous la direction de M. Brochant de Villiers …tome deuxième: Imprimerie Nationale, Paris. In: XII + 813 pp. 1848.

Élie de Beaumont, 1852 Élie de Beaumont L. Notice sur les Systèmes de Montagnes. Paris: P. Bertrand; 1069–1543. 1852;III  + 4 foldout plates.

Feyerabend P. Against Method. revised edition London: Verso; 1988 viii + 296.

Feyerabend P. Three Dialogues Concerning Knowledge. Oxford: Basil Blackwell; 1991.167.

Galopim de Carvalho A.M. Evolução do Pensamento Geológico nos Contextos Filosófico, Religioso, Social e Político da Europa. Lisboa: Ancora; 2014.277.

Guyot, E., 1943, L’emploi d’une projection cylindrique oblique pour l’étude de la dérive des continents: Bull. Soc. N. Sci. Nat., v. 68, pp. 105–111.

Higgins A.K., Soper N.J. Nares Straight was not a Cenozoic plate boundary. J. Geol. Soc. Lond. 1989;146:913–916.

Holmes W.H. Report on the geology of the northwestern portion of the Elk Range. In: Hayden F.V., ed. Annual Report of the United States Geological and Geographical Survey of the Territories, Embracing Colorado and Parts of Adjacent Territories; being a Report of Progress of the Exploration for the Years 1874. Washington: Government Printing Office; 1876:59–71  + 8 unnumbered plates.

Ketin İ. Über die tektonisch-mechanischen Folgerungen aus den grossen anatolischen Erdbeben des letzten Dezenniums. Geol. R. 1948;36:77–83.

Kitts D.B. The Structure of Geology. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press; 1977 xix + 180 pp.

Kley, J., 2013, Saxonische Tektonik im 21. Jahrhundert: Z. Deut. Geol. Gesellschaft, v. 164, pp. 295–311.

Kuhn, T. S., 1970, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, second edition, enlarged: International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, Foundations of the Unity of Science, v. II, nr. 2, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, XII + 210 p.

Kuhn T.S. In: Conant J., Haugeland J., eds. The Road Since Structure—Philosophical Essays, 1970–1993, with an Autobiographical Interview. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press; 2000 viii + 335 pp.

Landesanstalt P.G., ed. Göttinger Beiträge zur saxonischen Tektonik II. 1931 Abhandlungen der Preußischen Geologischen Landesanstalt, neue Folge, Heft 128, [II] + 147 pp + 7 plates.

Landesanstalt P.G., ed. Göttinger Beiträge zur saxonischen Tektonik III. 1932 Abhandlungen der Preußischen Geologischen Landesanstalt, neue Folge, Heft 139, [III] + 158 pp. + 8 plates.

Latour B., Woolgar S. Laboratory Life. Princeton: Princeton University Press; 1986 296.

Le Pichon X. Introduction to the publication of the extended outline of Jason Morgan's April 17, 1967 American Geophysical Union paper on Rises Trenches, Great Faults and Crustal Blocks. Tectonophysics. 1991;187:1–22.

Lemcke E. Der tektonische Bau des Gebietes zwischen Vogelsberg und Rhön. Geotektonische Forschungen. 1937 Heft I, pp. 28–68 + plates 1–5.

Lotze F. Das Falkenhagener Störungssystem: in Göttinger Beiträge zur saxonischen Tektonik III, Abhandlungen der Preußischen Geologischen landesanstalt neue Folge, Heft 128, pp. 1931 38–128 + plates 2–6.

Lotze F. Der Südteil des Göttinger Leinetalgrabens und der Eichenberger Grabenknoten: Abhandlungen der Preußischen Geologischen Landesanstalt, neue Folge, Heft. 5–48. 1932;139  + Plate 1.

Lotze F. Zur Methodik der Forschungen über saxonische Tektonik. Geotektonische Forschungen. 1937;1:6–27.

Martini H.-J. Großschollen and Gräben zwischen Habichtswald und Rheinischem Schiefergebirge. Geotektonische Forschungen. 1937;69–123 Heft I. + plates 6–8.

McKenzie D. The East Anatolian Fault: a major structure in eastern Turkey. Earth Planet. Sci. Lett. 1976;29:189–193.

McKenzie D.P., Morgan W.J. Evolution of triple junctions. Nature. 1969;224:125–133.

McKenzie D.P., Parker R.L. The North Pacific: an example of tectonics on a sphere. Nature. 1967;216:1276–1280.

Popper K.R.(.S.). The Poverty of Historicism, reprint of the third edition of 1961. New York: Harper Torchbooks, Harper & Row Publishers; 1964 x + 166 pp.

Popper K.R. The Open Society and Its Enemies. In: The High Tide of Prophecy: Hegel, Marx, and the Aftermath. Fifth, revised edition Princeton: Princeton University Press; . 1966;vol. 2 v + [i] + 420 pp.

Radig F., Rosenfeld U. Franz Lotze. Neues Jahrbuch für Geologie und Paläontologie. 1963;117:1–8 (Festschrift Lotze).

Richter-Bernburg G. Saxonische Tektonik. Hans Stilles Begriff in heutiger Sicht: Zeitschrift der Deutschen Geologischen Gesellschaft 11–23. 1977;128.

Rickert H. Kulturwissenschaft und Naturwissenschaft, zweite umgearbeitete und vermehrte Auflage. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck); 1910 VII + 151 pp.

Routhier P. Essai Critique sur les Méhodes de la Géologie. Paris: Masson et Cie; 1969  202 +[II] pp.

Schmidt K., Rosenfeld U. Franz Lotze (1903–1971). Neues Jahrbuch für Geologie und Paläontologie. 1971;1971:581–593 Monatshefte.

Schuchert C. The hypothesis of continental displacement. In: van Waterschoot van der Gracht W.A. J. M. et al., eds. Theory of Continental Drift–A Symposium on the Origin and Movement of Land Masses both Inter-Continental and Intra-Continental, as proposed by Alfred Wegener. Tulsa: The American Association of Petroleum Geologists; 1928a:104–144.

Schuchert C. The hypothesis of continental displacement. In: Smithsonian Report for 1928, Publication 2988. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office; 1928b:249–282.

Şengör, 1995 Şengör A.M.C. Sedimentation and tectonics of fossil rifts. In: Busby C.J., Ingersoll R.V., eds. Tectonics of Sedimentary Basins. Oxford: Blackwell; 1995:53–117.

Şengör, 2003 Şengör A.M.C. The repeated rediscovery of mélanges and its implications for the possibility and the role of objective evidence in the scientific enterprise. In: Dilek Y., Newcomb S., eds. Ophiolite Concept and the Evolution of Geological Thought. 385–445. Geological Society of America Special Paper. 2003;373.

Şengör, 2005 Şengör A.M.C. Repeated independent discovery and ‘objective evidence’ in science: an example from geology. In: Irzık G., Güzeldere G., eds. Turkish Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science. The Netherlands: Springer; 2005:113–136.

Şengör, 2008 Şengör A.M.C. Discovery of strike-slip faulting in the Alps. In: The Geological Society of America 2008 Joint Annual Meting Abstracts with Programs. 2008:353 v. 40, No. 6.

Şengör, 2018 Şengör A.M.C. What has remained of Hans Stille's tectonics?. Glob. Tect. Metal. (Stille special issue). 2018;10:77–107.

Seymen İ., Aydın A. The Bingöl earthquake fault and its relation to the North Anatolian Fault Zone. Bull. Miner. Res. Explor. Inst. Turkey. 1972;79:1–8.

Smit Sibinga G.L. On the relation between deep-focus earthquakes, gravity and morphology in the Netherlands east Indies. Gerlands Beiträge Geophys. 1937;51:402–409.

Stille H. Die mitteldeutsche Rahmenfaltung. In: 3. Jahresbericht des Niedersächsischen geologischen Vereins zu Hannover (Geologische Abteilung der Naturhistorischen Gesellschaft zu Hannover). 1910a:141–170  + plate V.

Stille H. Senkungs-Sedimentations-und Faltungsräume. C. R. XIe Congr. Géol. Int. 1910b;819–836 (1912).

Stille H. Übersichtskarte der Saxonischen Gebirgsbildung, 1:250.000. Berlin: Preußische Geologische Landesanstalt; 1922a 1 sheet.

Stille H. Die Schrumpfung der Erde—Festrede gehalten zur Jahresfeier der Georg August-Universität zu Göttingen am 5. Juli 1922. Berlin: Gebrüder Borntraeger; 1922b.37.

Stille H., ed. Göttinger Beiträge zur saxonischen Tektonik. 1923–1925 Abhandlungen der Preußischen Geologischen Landesanstalt, neue Folge, Heft 95, [II] + 207 pp. + 14 plates.

Stille H. Grundfragen der Vergleichenden Tektonik. Berlin: Gebrüder Borntraeger; 1924 VII +[I] + 443 pp.

Stille H. The upthrust of salt masses of Germany [translated from the German by Donald C. Barton]. Bull. Am. Assoc. Petrol. Geol. 1925;9:417–441.

Stille H. Formenfolgen der Tektonik in Mitteleuropa und Zentralasien. Trudi III Vsesoyuznogo S’ezda Geologov, Taschkent 57–68. 1930a;1928.

Stille H. Göttinger Beiträge zur saxonischen Tektonik II. Abhandlungen der Preußischen Geologischen Landesanstalt, neue Folge, Heft 116, [II] + 237 pp. + 17 plates 1930b.

Stille H. Asymmetric folds with reference to German salt bodies. Bull. Am. Assoc. Petrol. Geol. 1932;16:169–177.

Stille H. Einführung in den Bau Amerikas. Berlin: Gebrüder Borntraeger; 1940 XX + 717 pp.

Stille H., Lotze F., eds. Zur germanotypen Tektonik I. 1937 Geotektonische Forschungen, Heft 1, 123 pp. + 8 plates.

Stille H., Lotze F., eds. Zur germanotypen Tektonik II. 1938 Geotektonische Forschungen, Heft 3, 84 pp. + 8 plates.

Stille H., Lotze F., eds. Zur germanotypen Tektonik III. 1940 Geotektonische Forschungen, Heft 5, 134 pp. + 6 plates.

Suess E. Ueber den Aufbau der mitteleuropäischen Hochgebirge. Anzeiger der Akademie der Wissenschaften [in Wien], für die Woche von 24. Juli 1873 1873.130–131.

Suess E. Die Entstehung der Alpen. Wien: W. Braumüller; 1875 IV + 168 pp.

Suess E. Das Antlitz der Erde, v. Ia (Erste Abtheilung). 1883 F. Tempsky, Prag and G. Freytag, Leipzig, 310 pp. (English translation: Suess, E., 1904, The Face of the Earth (Das Antlitz der Erde), v. I, translated by Hertha B. C. Sollas under the direction of W. J. Sollas: Clarendon Press, Oxford, xii + 604 pp.

Suess E. Über die Zerlegung der gebirgsbildenden Kraft. Mitteil. Geol. Gesellschaft Wien. 1913;I:13–60  + 2 photographic plates.

Taylor F.B. Bearing of the Tertiary mountain belt on the origin of the earth's plan. Bull. Geol. Soc. Am. 1910;21:179–226.

Twain M. The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and Other Sketches. New York: C. H. Webb; 1867 198 pp.

von Engelhardt W.(.B.)., Zimmermann J. Theorie der Geowissenschaft. Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh; 1982.382.

Wegener A. Die Entstehung der Kontinente und Ozeane. Braunschweig: Friedrich Vieweg & Sohn; 1915 V + 94 pp.

Wegmann C.E. Sur un controle géologique de la dérive des continents. Bull. Soc. Neuchâteloise Sci. Nat. 1943;68:97–104.

Wellman H.W. New Zealand quaternary tectonics. Geol. R. 1955;43:248–257.

Wilson J.T. The development and structure of the crust. In: Kuiper G.P., ed. The Earth as a Planet: The Solar System II. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press; 1954:138–214.

Wilson J.T. A new class of faults and their bearing on continental drift. Nature. 1965;207:343–347.

Wutzke U., Meschede M., Ruchholz M.C. Alfred Wegener und die Mechanik der Kontinentalbewegung. Z. Geol. Wissenschaften. 2013/14;41/42:275–282.

Further Reading

Berlage Jr. H.P. A provisional catalogue of deep-focus earthquakes in the Netherlands east Indies 1918–1936. Gerlands Beiträge Geophys.. 1937;50:7–17.

Rickert H. Die Grenzen der Naturwissenschaftlichen Begriffsbildung—eine logische Einleitung in die historischen Wissenschaften, 3. und 4. Auflage. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck); 1921 XXVIII + 563 pp.

---

¹ Yet I must distance myself from Popper's distinction of historical sciences from physics. See also his pp. 143–147. He makes the distinction because he thinks historical sciences deal with unique, contingent events, whereas physics deals with general laws of universal application, although he admits the hypothetical nature of the physical laws. In this train of thought, Popper follows the neoKantian philosopher Rickert, (1910, pp. 53 ff.; 1921, 165 ff.; see also Popper, 1966, p. 264). What makes his distinction void, however, is that physics too deals with a unique and contingent event, namely, the evolution of our universe.

² The German term Bruchfalten was translated into English as fault-folds and Bruchfaltung as fault-folding by Donald C. Barton in his translation of Stille's article on the upthrust of the salt masses of Germany (see Stille, 1925, p. 420). The term fault-fold is, however, an American invention introduced to describe the structure of the Elk Range in the United States Rockies by William Holmes (1876, pp. 68 and 71), accompanied by his magnificent and famous cross sections and relief model (unnumbered plates in Holmes, 1876, between pp. 70 and 71; for reproductions of these, see Suess, 1883, pp. 214–215, Figs. 22 and 23). Suess translated Holmes’ term into German as Bruchfalte in the first volume of his Das Antlitz der Erde (Suess, 1883, p. 215). Holmes’ detailed cross sections, displayed on his last foldout plate, will give a good idea of what a germanotype structure looks like, identified as such by Stille (1940, p. 242, fig. 59). In Stille [1928 (1930), p. 57, footnote 2], there is a warning about not confusing fault-folds, in which folds and faults develop simultaneously, with folds that are subsequently sliced by