This is the story of how the world travels of a 19th century explorer, two bar magnets and the World War II hunt for enemy submarines led to the invention of the portable fluxgate magnetometer. And how that invention, in turn, led to the “magic profile,” a powerful piece of evidence for the theory of plate tectonics.
In the 1950s, the idea that Earth’s continents might be on the move was largely ridiculed, and the seafloor was still mostly a mystery. But that was about to change: In the aftermath of World War II and its naval battles, researchers suddenly had powerful new tools, such as submersibles and sonar
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