《海洋盆地的歷史》

Hess opens by naming the spirit of the paper. He is reasoning ahead of the data, and says so — a frank disclaimer rare in a scientific paper, and one that became its most quoted line.

(Paraphrase.) Hess assembles the wartime and post-war findings about the deep sea: the mid-ocean ridges form a single globe-encircling mountain system; the ocean floor carries surprisingly little sediment and no rocks older than the Mesozoic; heat flow is high over the ridges; and the deep trenches mark belts of earthquakes. The oceans, he argues, are young and active, not the ancient permanent basins geology had assumed.

(Paraphrase.) His proposal: slow convection cells in the mantle rise beneath the mid-ocean ridges, where hot mantle wells up and freezes into new basaltic ocean floor. That floor is then carried laterally away from the ridge — like a conveyor belt riding on the top of the convecting mantle — and descends again at the trenches, where the cell turns downward. The whole ocean floor is therefore created, transported, and recycled on a timescale of only a few hundred million years, which is why it is so young and so thinly veneered with sediment.

(Paraphrase.) Crucially, the continents do not plough through the ocean floor — Wegener's fatal difficulty — but ride passively atop the moving mantle, between a rising ridge and a descending trench. Hess uses the flat-topped drowned seamounts he had charted from the deck of USS Cape Johnson during the war (he named them guyots) as evidence: volcanoes built near a ridge, planed flat by waves, then carried down and away as the floor spread and cooled and sank.