"Somewhere in the universe it is always the morning of creation." "All matter of earth - every particle of our bodies - has existed before in other suns and times distant beyond all our powers to imagine." "We were of the primordial matter formed in the violent creation of the universe nearly 20 billion years ago." "Our matter burned in the refineries of a great star and was flung again into the void in a supernova explosion." "From the debris of the supernova gravity begins to shape a solar system." "Gas and dust coalesce." "Shadow planets form sweeping up vast quantities of matter as they carve orbits through the solar nebula." "Then, at the center the mighty engines of the sun flare and ignite." "Through four and a half billion years." "an Earth evolved to which no human eyes were witness." "The molten earth crusted and cooled." "Volcanoes discharged the gases and waters which would film the planet's surface." "Continents emerged from primeval seas." "Life evolved." "It was no static and finished Earth which modern man surveyed." "We found echoes of chaos everywhere... evidence of titanic forces and movements... and we re-asked the ancient questions:" "Why volcanoes?" "Why earthquakes?" "Why the torn and upheaved landscapes?" "And we probed newer mysteries:" "Why matching geological formations divided by oceans?" "Why the fossils of identical life on widely separated continents?" "Why glacier tracks in the Sahara oil in the Arctic, coal in Antarctica?" "How had ancient seafloors become mountain peaks?" "What processes of creation could resist the unceasing work of glacier wind and water?" "Given the age of Earth, these forces of erosion should have leveled the continents a hundred times." "Our search for answers opened eyes smaller and larger than our own." "We read the codes of fossils." "Images from space of the torn continents." "Heartbeats of earthquakes from the Earth's interior." "The molten flows of its volcanoes." "Slender cores drilled from its deepest seafloors." "From a dozen sciences came the fragments of answers which were to revolutionize the study of Earth." "An astonishing theory took shape." "It is a theory called "Global Plate Tectonics"" "but it is nothing less than the rediscovery of the Earth " "an encompassing theory of Earth's crust being contnuously created and destroyed... of a genesis which has never ended... of extaordinary journeys of the continents." "The most recent journey began almost 200 million years ago when dinosaurs were in their ascendancy." "All of the continents were then assembled in a single land mass - a super-continent, now called Pangaea." "180 million years ago, a great rift has begun to open between what will become North America and Africa." "The Atlantic is born." "135 million years ago the first true birds appear in the primeval skies." "South America fractures from Africa." "Great areas of the continents drown and emerge with the drift of the continents." "Climates and weather change constantly shaping the evolution of life." "India has broken free from Antartica and drifts north to collide with Asia 40 million years ago creating the mighty Himalayas and the Tibetan plateau." "Dinosaurs have perished." "Mammals multiply." "The Atlantic windens as the Pacific dies." "The world we know took form." "We now know the crust of the Earth to consist of a number of rigid plates." "Like great rafts of stone bearing the continents on their backs these plates sail sluggishly - inches in years - over the hot, deeper mantle of the Earth." "The plates are in constant relative motion building apart.." "colliding..." "Sliding past one another... overriding other plates... plunging to destruction within the interior from which they formed." "The movements of the plates are sustained by the continuous creation of new earth's crust" "The process- one of four major tectonic processes - is called "seafloor spreading."" "It occurs within the central rifts of the great mid-ocean ridges which wind for 40,000 miles across the ocean floors." "Beneath these rifts, Earth's crust is thinnest and the pressures of the magma rising from the fiery interior are relentless." "The magma forces its way upward entering the rift between the plates spreading the seafloor, breaking to its surface in spectacular undersea lava forms." "Along this great system of mid-ocean ridges suddenly volcanoes are born and ashy islands, black and burning are thrust up out of the sea." "We are witnessing the birth of the island of Surtsey near Iceland." "For months, this tiny ashen island waged a battle for survival against the sea." "lts survival depended on the surfacing of lava from deep within the rift - lava which would armor Surtsey against the waves of the north Atlantic." "Surtsey had become the newest battleground in Earth's oldest war " "In cessant forces of erosion, relentless powers of creation." "Surtsey survives." "Today, this small volcanic island so recently created from the fire of Earth's interior has earned a place on the maps of the Earth." "Like Surtsey, all of Iceland was created in fiery volcanic emergence for here, the colossal mid-Atlantic eidge has surfaced to form the greatest volcanic island on Earth." "Upon this extraordinary land of ice and fire of glaciers stained with the ashes of a thousand eruptions we can view the exposed features of seafloor spreading... the newest crust of Earth." "Oceans of congealed lava." "Towering shield volcanoes, such as Hekla the greatest, most effusive of Iceland's volcanoes." "Lakagiar, a long alignment of more than 100 volcanic cones marking a major fissure atop the mid-Atlantic ridge." "The island of Heimaey, where an eruption in 1 973" "Threatened to bury the town of Vestmannaeyjar." "And the stretch marks of creation - great cracks in the Earth left by spreading plates." "Beneath us, the American plate and the Eurasian plate are born and slowly grow apart" "Iceland grows from the center outward at the rate at which the Atlantic widens - slower than a human fingernail grows." "Yet in 1 80 million years." "this slow spreading of the plates created the Atlantic and in the last 1 3 million years it built this great volcanic island straddling this boundary of creation." "Far from Iceland and the mid-Atlantic ridge the rifting process which splits continents and creates oceans has only begun." "Yet is has created a geologic feature so enormous it can be seen from the moon - the Breat Rift Valley of Africa." "This great crack in the Earth's crust extends for 4,000 miles, from Mozambique in the south to Lebanon in the north." "Where the continent fractured some 20 million years ago an escarpment plunges 2,000 feet to the sunken rift floor." "The remains of great volcanoes dominate the Rift Valley eroding monuments to the continent-splitting forces still at work beneath." "On the floor of the Rift Valley roam remnats of the great animal herds of Africa." "They run where valley floor did not yet exist ten million years ago... where a sea may exist in ten million more... or a great ocean in a hundred million." "And here, in the eroded gorges of the rift floor in the exposed sediments of three million years we have unearthed the clearest record of the genesis of man." "For here, anthropologist have discovered the oldest fossil remains spanning human evolution." "Life has been profoundly shaped by the movement and separation of the continents." "Had not the continents been continuouly raised and renewed life would never have adcanced from the sea." "Had not the continents separated" "Life would not have been isolated in separate preserves to proliferate in a thousand directions which evolution explored." "Had not the climates and weather constantly changed with the drift of the continents newer, more adaptive life-forms would not have evolved to displace older species." "Mamal might never have succeeded reptile." "Man might never have gained dominion over all the fish and fowl and over every living thing that moveth upon the Earth." "Man has been uniquely favored by the forces which move and alter the Earth's crust" "yet through all his history he has remained a hostage to their powers of destruction." "As new earth's crust is created in the spreading rifts and ridges of the earth older crust is destroyed in a second great tectonic process called "subduction."" "When an ocean floor plate collides with a continental plate the havier seafloor plate is subducted." "It fractures and plunges beneath the thicker, more buoyant continental plate creating an ocean tranch." "Ponderously moving inches in years, the great slab descends generating deep earthquakes when it moves." "The heat of friction and of the Earth's interior slowly consumes the plate." "lts lighter elements rise as magma toward the surface fracturing paths through the continental plate emerging in the violence of volcanic eruptions." "No one who has witnessed the violance of a volcano can continue in the innocent belief in a placid, unchanging earth nor in the continuity of our history nor in the inevitable progress of our civilizations" "15 centuries before Christ" "Europe's first great civilization flourished in the eastern Mediterranean." "It was the Minoan civilization, and this - the palace of King Minos at Knossos on Crete - its greatest palace." "The Minoans dominated the Mediterranean in their time." "Then, almost overnight the Minoan culture was lost in an eclipe of time." "What power could cripple a civilization in a stroke?" "The new theory of plate tectonics suggested a cataclysmic tectonic event" "Evidence led scientists 70 mile north of Crete to a small island in the Aegean Sea, Santorini - ancient Thera." "Where once a lofty mountain stood is a huge abyss - the collapsed caldera of a great volcano - the shell of the greatest cataclysm in human history." "Sheer cliffs plunge a thousand feet to the sea and more than a thousand feet into its depths." "The present villages of Thera" "Cling definatly to the edge of an unremembered catastrophe." "But recently, with new theories and new tools scientists have reconstructed an awesome event" "35 centuries ago at the height of the Minoan civilization" "Thera erupted with the energy of 50,000 atomic bombs." "Earth shocks toppled Knossos." "lmmense waves 300 feet high crushed the ports and palaces of the Minoans." "A great civilization had been struck a blow from which it would never recover." "The course of western civilization was forever changed." "On the remains of Thera beneath massive layers of pumice and ash scientists have penetrated an extraordinary time capsule - a city buried by the cataclysm - the home of the Minoans of Thera" " Akrotiri." "In these ruins of this extraordinary civilization many find the source of one of the world's great legends - of a magnificent civilization which disappeared into the sea - of a lost continent which Plato called Atlantis." "The tectonic process continues and from the center of the caldera the volcano rises again, building a new Thera to destroy." "This shattered island remain a mounment not to the wrathful power of Minoan gods but to the power of Earth's tectonic forces over the course of human history." "A third tectonic process occurs when continent collides with continent" "Neither of these great plates is driven to destruction in the heavier, underlying mantle." "insteadm they override and compress with titanic force pleating huge rock strata into accordion folds heaving them up driving enormous mountains into the sky." "The Alps are a young mountain range - only about 20 million years old." "They were created when Italy, riding the African plate collided with Europe and punched these jagged peaks into a younger daylight" "Eiger, Jungfrau, Matterhorn - magical names." "Like the immortal sea the mountains speak to something deep in our human nature." "they suggest the grandeur and terror of human disorders... of unimaginably vast processes... of time scales where the individual life seems hardly more than the span of a mayfly and the life of a whole civilization is less than a mountain moment, or heartbeat of common stones." "In the scale of the earth's plates, the movements are imperceptible." "In the scale of man they are the living nightmare of an earthquake." "This is earthquake country." "a great fault tears 700 miles through the crust of California." "It is the San Andeas Fault the classic example of the last major tectonic process." "Beneath us, two great plates of the Earth's crust are moving and grinding laterally past one another generating earthquakes in the spasms of their slow movement" "To the left, a huge slice of western California rides the Pacific Plate as it drifts northward past the American Plate on the right" "The fitful movement averages but two inches a year yet it has already carried more than 300 miles." "And, in 50 million years, this slice of California including the present sites of Los Angles and San Diego will be an Arctic island approaching the Aleutian Trench." "North on the fault line stands a great and beautiful city " "San Francisco." "In 1 906, a powerful earthquake and resulting fire leveled this city." "Since, the stresses have steadily accumulated in the fault" "Yet, when the San Andreas launches another great earthquake" "San Francisco need not die." "In our new awareness of Earth's forces we have designed our buildings to withstand the greatest of earthquakes." "Already, a new science has taken the first promising steps in predicting and controlling earthquakes." "Our new theories of plate tectonics have begun to yield a harvest of benefits." "They have focused our search for minerals and petroleum." "We have only begun to tap the immense sources of energy that underlie the earth." "Today, Iceland heats its entire capital of Reykjavik from thermal wells tapping the fires of the mid-Atlantic Ridge." "In time, we may learn to harness the inexhaustible furnaces of the interior of our planet" "The processes of genesis continue." "The Atlantic widens." "Africa fractures." "The Alps grow." "A new Thera rises." "The voyages of the continents continue." "We have peered into the boundaries of creation and read the fires and flow of genesis and seen our own molten image." "And we perceive, as never before the fiery, moving outlines of the immense and awesome journey of which we are a part" "And for all the people back on Earth the crew of Apollo 8 has a message that we would like to send to you:" ""In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth." "And the earth was without form, and void..."" "Science has only deepened the wonder of genesis." "The more we leaen of Nature's processes the more beautiful the faces of our Earth and the more mysterious our own beings." "From the ashes of long-ago stars;" "from the volcano's molten fire;" "from the vanished life which rode the drifting continents evolved the miracle of human thought" "Within our minds, continents move." "The earth evolves." "The universe unfolds." "Within us burns a special fire." "On Earth, it is again the morning of creation."