Tuzo: The Unlikely Revolutionary of Plate Tectonics

Tuzo is the never-before-told story of one of Canada’s most influential scientists and the discovery of plate tectonics, a pivotal development that forever altered how we think of our planet.

Your home is not where it was last night, and it will be in a different place tomorrow. This is the result of plate tectonics, a process most of us accept without hesitation today, but whose discovery was a true revolution that forever changed how we think of planet Earth.

In 1961, a Canadian geologist named John Jock Tuzo Wilson (1908-1993) jettisoned decades of strongly held opposition to theories of moving continents and embraced the idea that they drift across the surface of the Earth on large plates of crust. Against the backdrop of the wider social and political upheavals of the 1960s, plate tectonics revolutionized the science of geology.

Tuzo tells the fascinating life story of Tuzo Wilson, from his early forays as a teenaged geological assistant working on the remote Canadian Shield in the 1920s to his experiences as a civilian-soldier in the Second World War to his ultimate role as the venerated father of plate tectonics.

Illuminating how science is done, this book blends Tuzo’s life story with the development of the theory of plate tectonics, showing along the way how scientific theories are debated, rejected, and accepted. Gorgeously illustrated, Tuzo will appeal to anyone interested in the natural world around them.