But others geophysicists presented support for lateral forces. Mary Lou Zoback of the U.S. Geological Survey and Mark Zoback of Stanford suggested that stress patterns in the western United States are more consistent with driving from the side. My technique shows what is happening under the continental shields but is not the full answer, especially because we have little data for the oceans yet. Taken together, scientific evidence will guide geodynamicists, such as UCLA's Paul Tackley, who attempt to model mantle convection and the motion of surface plates. So there is more need to understand what the Earth does.
Seismology is a broad and rapidly developing field.
Though the discipline has existed for at least a hundred years, recent dramatic improvement in data coverage and data quality likely will lead to new insights into what is happening inside the Earth, Bokelmann said. And in the past we didn't have many observations to tell us what the dynamics in the Earth's interior are. We're just now starting to get this. Meanwhile, the controversy continues. Everybody knows the answer.