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57 5 Mad Rise Cambridge, England, 1965 I enjoy, and have always enjoyed, disturbing scientists. —John Tuzo Wilson Fred Vine was alone in his office at Madingley Rise when he heard the door opening below and feet pounding up the wooden stairs—three steps at a time, from the sound of it. “What are you doing?” demanded the breathless voice ascending the stairs. “Stop!” At the sound, Vine’s long face broke into a wide smile. Wilson was back. John Tuzo Wilson, a geologist from the University of Toronto, had arrived a couple of months earlier, in January 1965, just a few days ahead of Princeton’s Harry Hess, both of them at Cambridge on a half-year’s sabbatical. The university’s Department of Geodesy and Geophysics was housed in a Victorian-era yellow brick manse known as Madingley Rise, for the knoll on which it sat, some distance west of the center of campus. “Mad Rise,” as it was known to its denizens, had been built in the previous century as a residence by a distinguished Cambridge astronomer; since 1955 it had been home to what had become Great Britain’s largest geophysics group. Vine shared an office with his supervising professor, Drummond Matthews, in what had been the coachman’s quarters, above the stables off the house’s rear courtyard, next to the hayloft where the department’s sediment cores pulled from the seafloor were now stored. Wilson and Hess were both assigned to the guest office on the ground floor of the main house. By the time Hess arrived, however, Wilson had spread out and made the office, for all intents, his own; Hess, when he wasn’t collaborating with colleagues, worked from an office at his sabbatical-year home nearby. Madingley Rise was a quiet niche in an already quiet campus backwater— quieter still that January, when most of the marine geophysicists were away at sea doing research. Vine, who stayed behind to finish work on his PhD 58 The Next Tsunami dissertation, had found himself in the enviable position of being nearly alone with two of North America’s most esteemed geologists. Better yet, Wilson and Hess were, like Vine himself, “drifters”—adherents to the midtwentieth century’s revival of continental drift theory, and as such, out of step with most of their American and Canadian colleagues. Hess had even gone out of his way, upon his arrival at Madingley Rise, to tell Vine he thought the Vine-Matthews hypothesis was a “fantastic” idea. That was practically a first: unabashed enthusiasm for the theory Vine and Matthews had proposed to faint praise a year and a half earlier. And from no less than Harry Hess, whom Vine had heard speak back in 1962 while he was still an undergraduate and already a quiet believer in continental drift. Even Vine’s own colleagues at Cambridge had been chary with their support for VineMatthews . Department head Maurice Hill had simply changed the subject when Vine had discussed his theory prior to publication, and Teddy Bullard, while generally encouraging, had quickly declined Vine’s suggestion that he might co-author the paper; the hypothesis rested upon too many unproven notions for the likes of Sir Edward. Now, heady with fresh ideas exchanged while bent over the squiggled lines of magnetic profiles spread on a desktop or lingering over sandwiches in the house’s pine-paneled coffee room, flattered and emboldened by Wilson’s and Hess’s interest in his theories about faults and ridges and the movement of continents, Vine had even shared with Wilson some thoughts he had about certain fractures in the seafloor—faults that seemed to be connected to ridges, offsetting them, in the equatorial Atlantic Ocean. Wilson hadn’t actually taken much interest in those ideas, or hadn’t seemed to—rather than toss them around, or even debunk them, Wilson had, at the time, simply changed the subject. In fact, Wilson had no sooner settled in at Cambridge before leaving again, trading England’s damp, chilly winter for the sunny Mediterranean off southern Turkey, where he’d booked a February sailing trip with his family. Now he was back, and—evinced by his energy racing up the stairs— recharged with more, newer, better ideas. Whatever Vine was doing, Wilson declared as he burst into the office, “It can’t be as important as what I want to tell you!” If the Vine-Matthews hypothesis was right, Wilson explained in a rush, and...

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