Talk about a geeky project: the remarkable mantleplumes.org site is compiling, from volunteer submissions, a "Foundations" list of the top 100 publications. It's at 69 items right now, and skews heavily toward the last half-century and the skeptics side of the mantle-plumes debate. That's OK; it also includes, for example, James Hutton's original 1785 address to the Royal Society of Edinburgh and a fascinating historical survey by Rudolph Trümpy, "Why Plate Tectonics Was Not Invented in the Alps."
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I think its focus is too narrow. What about big ideas in geomorphology, for instance? Or metamorphic rocks? Or structures smaller than a plate boundary? Or sedimentary rocks? Or climate, especially if we are to broaden it to “geoscience”?
I would agree w/ Kim … perhaps a good start, but far too narrow to be titled ‘best geological papers’ … maybe ‘important papers in mantle plume debate’.
Nevertheless, a nice list of papers, many that I’ve never read.
Golly, gosh, gee, that would sorta depend on your specialty wouldn’t it? How about books? Shrock’s “Sequence in Layered Rocks” would be right up there. Even a recent book by a non-geologist, McPhee’s “Annals of the Former World” has a good claim to a place on the list.
Well, everyone’s top 100 would obviously be different… and this one obviously reflects a tectonics/plumes bias amongst the compilers. Nonetheless, I think that there’s a fair number on this list which we could allagree have been extremely influential
And no, I’m not just saying that because palaeomagnetism is well represented.
No Alvarez et al. The paper on the Gubbio iridium revolutionized many aspects of geology, astronomy and biology
Yes, the Alvarez et al geology paper(s) on iridium (coupled with Jan Smits paper already listed)have done more to initiate a broad revamping of nearly every physical science since the advent of plate tectonics.
We all now look to the stars for answers, the real stars!
That is WAY overstating the importance of Alvarez et al, whose only breakthrough was to make a convincing case for impact extinctions. No new physics or chemistry or any other natural science was involved. It was a novel synthesis, one worthy of the top 100. But impact is still a minor cause of mass extinction — research today is showing how little impact impacts have.
You are WAY under stating the importance of the Alvarez/Smit works. These papers are more about the WAY you look for and look at data. The WAY the scientific process works. The WAY minds were open to now examine new ideas that challenge the WAY we look at physical processes.
If there was a way to rank any of these Top 100 papers on the number of times they were cited in subsequent professional literature I believe that the Alvarez and Smit papers will have demonstrated just how much of an “impact” (pun intended) they have had on not only geologic but interdisciplinary scientific research since 1980.
I would have liked to see T.C. Chamberlin and/or G.K. Gilbert get a gig in that list….multiple working hypotheses and all that: pretty fundamental stuff
Atwater, T., and Stock, J., 1988, Pacific-North America Plate Tectonics of the Neogene Southwestern United States – An Update, International Geological Review, v. 40, p. 375-402
Okay, so it’s more tectonics, and it’s localized to the soutwestern U.S., but it’s a brilliant summary of the Neogene evolution of the region and an excellent reconstruction of plate motion.