Have you ever seen a geologist furiously drawing on the tablecloth at the end of a good lunch ?
Hopefully, the tablecloth was in paper and then torn apart to allow continuing the discussion when back in the lab. Acceptable alternatives were paper napkins or any small paper sheet at hand.
We are currently cleaning our Tectonics Lab. storeroom. Lot of dirty work ! But amid a mountain of old papers to move to the bin, we are finding few invaluable historical pieces, like these two ones drawn by Paul Tapponnier sometimes in the 1980s. Both sketch the active tectonics of western North America in its plate tectonic frame, the main structures here being the San Andreas Fault, the Juan de Fuca plate and the Cascade subduction.
The first drawing is a scan of a paper tablecloth about 70cm long and for sure stolen from a restaurant ! Paul's style of drawing and writing is easily identifiable for us. No need to comment a lot. Just noting that several seismic gaps were identified, including a magnitude 8 on the Cascade subduction megathrust.
The second one, a smaller sketch but an even larger tectonic system, makes clear the tectonic kinematic connections along the whole West American margin. It goes from oblique extension in the Gulf of California to collision in Alaska. At this time, Paul was intensely thinking about extrusion processes and large scale horizontal tectonic movements, together with Peter Molnar and others. This is obviously shown by these pictures that provide a special glimpse on how Science is made (at least brainstorming and hypothesis development).
