Soft Plate and Impact Tectonics

In the field of tectonics, most of our ideas are published in journals. This is not true of other fields, such as history, in which ideas are primarily published in books. Within my own field of structural geology, I can recall only one book, Strain Fades by E. Hansen (Springer‐Verlag, 1971), which presents a new idea in book form. However, even this book is more useful for its philosophical approach and particular methodology of determining directions of folding, than for its overarching idea. Enter Soft Plate and Impact Tectonics , a new book with an interesting hypothesis that has been informally discussed in the geoscience community: A fundamental tenet of plate tectonics is incorrect—namely, that the plates are rigid. This assertion is evident when looking at any mountain range, and is perhaps most clearly stated in Molnar [1988].