Chapter 1 - Franz Lotze and the Origin of the Idea of Transform Faulting in Central Europe

Abstract

The idea of transform faulting, i.e., strike-slip faulting penetrating the lithosphere and connecting two other areas of deformation by transforming the motion along them, originated in Central Europe in 1937, where a number of independent blocks move with respect to one another and are separated by convergent, divergent, and strike-slip boundaries. The idea was already implicit in Eduard Suess’ Die Entstehung der Alpen (1875), where he likened the motion of the Central European blocks to floes in drifting pack ice, but it was Franz Lotze's monumental 1937 paper on the methodology of investigating what his teacher Hans Stille had called “Saxonikum” that explicitly spelled it out and illustrated in figures. Lotze's figures correspond one-to-one with those by J. Tuzo Wilson in his famous 1965 paper that introduced the term transform fault and inaugurated plate tectonics, although it is almost certain that Wilson was unaware of Lotze's paper. This is an instance of rediscovering the wheel in geology and clinches the argument that science does come into contact with reality, as Popper had argued, and that our scientific hypotheses are not just personal whims as Thomas Kuhn would have wanted us to believe. Science progresses because it comes into contact with reality.