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Sometime in 1963, Lawrence Morley proposed an outlandish theory: That rocks on the ocean floor were imprinted with a record of the direction and intensity of the Earth’s magnetic field. Because the planet’s magnetic polarity reversed direction every half-million years or so, he believed that iron-rich rocks and ridges on the sea floor “remembered” field reversals by locking into place their magnetic properties at the time of formation. As on the Earth’s surface, rocks miles beneath the ocean told a story, he believed.
Dr. Morley based this highly speculative theory on ocean surveys that had shown alternating bands of normal and reverse magnetism in the ocean’s crust. The patterns were so distinct that undersea maps, in black and white to represent the two magnetic orientations, resembled zebra stripes. It was all very puzzling.
“I believe,” he wrote, despite the mystery, “that there still is a wealth of unexpected information magnetically frozen in the rocks of the ocean basin floors.”
He completed a paper on his conclusions, building on earlier theories on continental drift and the spreading out of the seafloor. It was rejected. The journal’s referee, in a snub now well-known in the scientific community, tartly noted that the idea may be interesting for “talk at cocktail parties, but it is not the sort of thing that ought to be published under serious scientific aegis.”
