Transform Plate Boundaries and Fracture Zones

Joao C. Duarte, Joao C. Duarte

• Publisher: Elsevier
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780128122464
• Topic: Naturwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Geophysik

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

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

• 1 Introduction
• 2 Post-Hercynian Tectonics of Central Europe
• 3 Franz Lotze and the Motion of the Blocks (Schollen) in the Alpine Foreland
• 4 Lotze and Wilson: Rediscovery of the Wheel and Its Implications
• 5 Conclusions
• 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 mountain...