Tasmania and Revival of Continental Drift

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The Royal Society of Tasmania: 2nd June 2024 lecture
John K Davidson
The Earth was formed over four billion years ago and has evolved by three principal evolutions, Continental Drift as the ‘boats’, Plants and Animals as the ‘passengers’ that travelled through the Climatic Zones and evolved under the influence of glaciations.
Most geologists assign the discovery of Continental Drift to Alfred Wegener in the early twentieth century, but the Minoans could ‘map’ the stars and sail from Crete to the mouths of the Nile River, 4,000 years ago.
The first mapped, movement of continents is seen in the reproduction of Eratosthenes’ of c.220BCE, followed by Ortelius’ 1596 map, then via geological and botanical advances and retreats until Professor S W Carey’s cartographically accurate map presented in Hobart in 1956, which put Continental Drift beyond doubt.
The major steps on this path from the Ancient Greeks to ‘get the Drift’ include a disproportionate number of visitors to Tasmania including the botanist Labillardiere in 1793, Charles Darwin the geologist in 1831, Joseph Dalton Hooker the botanist from 1839 and then ‘the locals’, the most recent being Dr Keith Corbett.
From this firmer historical basis, John proposes a pulsing Earth with a low but significant rate of expansion, contrary to the current paradigm of Plate Tectonics, an interpretation of Carey’s 1956, New Global Tectonics.

John Davidson graduated at the end of 1969 with a first class Honours Degree in Geology. He joined Esso Australia in Sydney the following January and attended Exxon’s structural geology course in 1972 during which he was asked to invite Professor Carey to Houston and to accompany him to the second global conference on Continental Drift at Princeton. Prof. Carey introduced him to Lewis Weeks who used data Carey sketched for him when Carey held John Rogers’ Chair at Yale in 1960. It was an opportunity to meet Weeks and other earliest adopters of Prof’s 1956 Hobart Symposium.
In 1974-75 John conducted Exxon’s corporate 3-week structural geology twice a year in the field from West Texas to the Canadian Rockies. He had four years in London and a year as project leader of Exmouth Plateau where he had the Scarborough gas field drilled. He left Exxon in 1980 and commenced a 40-year career of worldwide consulting on the detailed application of his undergraduate structural geology studies under Prof. Carey. He conducted a North Sea based oil exploration course in the field, within the section William Smith introduced in 1815.