1939-

English Geophysicist

In the 1960s Frederick J. Vine and his colleague Drummond Matthews (1931- ) emerged as foremost proponents of the theory of plate tectonics—the theory that the earth's crust is divided into shifting plates that include the continents embedded on their surface. Vine's research, presented in 1966, helped sway the opinions of geologists toward the idea that the ocean floor was created at the mid-ocean ridges and slowly spread apart as large individual plates.

Vine was born in Chiswick, England, a suburb of west London, to Frederick Royston Vine, an accountant, and Ivy Bryant Vine, a personal secretary. He studied natural sciences at St. John's College, Cambridge, and went on to obtain a Ph.D. in marine geophysics under the tutelage of Drummond Matthews.

In 1962, while undergoing his graduate studies at St. John's, Vine became intrigued, as many before him had, by the...