Harry Hammond Hess, a professor of geology at Princeton University, was very influential in setting the stage for the emerging plate-tectonics theory in the early 1960s. He believed in many of the observations Wegener used in defending his theory of continental drift, but he had very different views about large-scale movements of the Earth.
Even while serving in the U.S. Navy during World War II, Hess was keenly interested in the geology of the ocean basins. In between taking part in the fighting in the Marianas, Leyte, Linguayan, and Iwo Jima, Hess -- with the cooperation of his crew -- was able to conduct echo-sounding surveys in the Pacific while cruising from one battle to the next. Building on the work of English geologist Arthur Holmes in the 1930s, Hess' research ultimately resulted in a ground-breaking hypothesis that later would be called seafloor spreading. In 1959, he informally presented this hypothesis in a manuscript that was widely circulated. Hess, like Wegener, ran into resistance because little ocean-floor data existed for testing his ideas. In 1962, these ideas were published in a paper titled "History of Ocean Basins," which was one of the most important contributions in the development of plate tectonics. In this classic paper, Hess outlined the basics of how seafloor spreading works: molten rock (magma)oozes up from the Earth's interior along the mid-oceanic ridges, creating new seafloor that spreads away from the active ridge crest and, eventually, sinks into the deep oceanic trenches.
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