Wombats puts it very well – and I simply couldn’t have packed more wonderment and amazement and excitement in there myself.

YES! YES! YES! The majesty, the wonder of it all, the Awe I feel as I contemplate what we know…and what we may never know…serves as the foundation for my personal theology/spirituality and, yes, humbles me.

While we have a theory to explain the plethora of species on this planet, we still do not understand the plethora of subatomic particles. Even if we accept the idea that it all began with a Big Bang, there is no understanding about how the different particles, up-quarks, down quarks, charm quarks, strange quarks etc come to be there, where they came from, how they are related etc. Did they too arise by a process of evolution?

Neo-Darwinist theory, plate tectonics are the easy bit . Understanding the first few milliseconds after the Big Bang is a lot more tricky. As for understanding the nature of a singularity 1 micro-second before the Big Bang is going to be a whole lot more difficult, if not impossible. One does not have to be a creationist to believe there may still be room for God, even if he/she/it is merely an expression of a fact, difficult for the human mind to grasp, that absolute nothingness is impossible or, to put it another way, as Hoyle did, the Universe has always existed, and obeyed its own rules.

It’s a great shame that the incredible and beautiful insights which evolution gives us seem to cause some ‘religious’ movements such trouble.

To me, the complexities and wonders which creation (in it widest sense) produces can only serve to enhance my sense of awe and humility.

Narrow-mindedness does great discredit to religion. Unfortunately, those two things are all too often found together, all around the world – in Baghdad, Birmingham, Baltimore and Belfast alike.

There has been some recent investigation into the possibilities of plate tectonic processes operating on Mars and Venus.

If made up of similar solar system components, which presumably they are, then mantle convection and hence surface seismic activity are very likely to have taken place on those planets, too.

It then fell to me to teach it as part of the Earth Science module in GCSE science. Where the resource materials were strangely quiet was on the subject of what drives the conveyor belt. Oh, it’s convection currents in the magma, they said. Yes, I know, I said, but what drives them ? Oh, the Earth’s core is very hot, didn’t you know ? Yes, I did, but why is it hot ? Er, well it’s because the Earth was once a molten blob, and is still cooling down, or because of the crushing pressure at the centre creating friction.

Well, I didn’t buy either of those ideas, and asked around some more. That’s when I learned for the first time the theory that there are heavy radioactive elements at the Earth’s core that are decaying, releasing a steady stream of heat that keeps our lives exciting up on this fractured crust of ours, what with volcanoes, earthquakes, tsunamis etc.

There’s surprisingly little debate about that radioactive core theory, and even less popular knowledge of it, which has one wondering if it’s maybe a wild-eyed theory that is not yet received wisdom. It would help if we knew more about tectonic processes on other planets, or maybe moons as well, to see whether they are the norm, or are the result of unusual conditions.

But there was no mechanism understood then to explain about how continents could move around the globe. It was not until the 1960s that Vine and Matthews successfully interpreted magnetic stripes from the ocean floor as clear evidence that new oceanic crust was constantly being created at Mid Ocean Ridges, and destroyed by subduction in the deep ocean trenches.

Whilst continents are built of rocks up to 3 800 million years old, the oceanic crust preserved within the oceans is much younger. The oldest, in the Pacific, is of Jurassic age, less than 200 million years old – since all the older oceanic crust has been lost back into the mantle.

The proof of seafloor spreading at last provided a mechanism for continents to be translated around the globe – essentially we are living on mobile rafts which are in constant (although almost infinitessimally slow) relative motion.

Reconstruction of tectonic plate movements is primarily achieved through the study of magnetic polar wandering curves from different continents.

The foundations of plate tectonics are firmly based in geophysics, but the implications of the theory seamlessly explain the history of the Earth, and have much to say about the development of biological diversity as well.

Plate tectonics is a wonderfully beautiful and unifying piece of science, and as a geologist and a humble inhabitant of such a brief moment in the history of this planet, it continues to amaze and enthrall me, each and every day.