John C. Holden

John C. Holden (born 1934), often called Jack Holden, is an American geologist, scientific illustrator, and humorist known for his early research into tectonic drift with Robert S. Dietz in the 1960s and 1970s. In 1976 he founded the "International Society to Stop Continental Drift", a tongue-in-cheek organization which attracted hundreds of members and had the motto, "Eschew Sea-Floor Spreading".

Early life Holden was born in 1934 in Colón, Panama, and was raised in San Diego by his mother and her husband Warren Holden, a Navy officer. Holden's biological father was a San Diego milkman named Bud. As a child in the 1940s, Holden explored the canyons of California for days at a time and hunted rabbits with a pellet gun. They theorized that the Moon's surface was static, and that its craters were 3 billion-year-old remnants of astroid collisions.

The decade-long collaboration between Dietz and Holden involved stints in Washington, D.C. and Miami. During this period, Holden studied in a paleontology PhD program at the University of California, Berkeley but failed to graduate despite finishing his dissertation because he could not meet the requirement to read technical German. and began selling products including his "psychodoodle" drawings and custom globes with moveable continents that he had developed for Dietz. The books were praised by the journal Science, and the science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke was a fan of them. poetry books by the oceanographer Harris B. Stewart Jr. He jokingly told Newsweek that "something had to be done" because China and California would converge and cause "Communists to marry our children". He promoted a tongue-in-cheek counter-theory called "continental drip", based on the observation that continents appear to drip down toward the South Pole. Society headquarters was the house in Winthrop where Holden lived with his elderly mother, Bumper stickers for the group had the slogan "Stop Continental Drift", as well as "Reunite Gondwanaland" and "Join the Mothers’ March Against Volcanos". including both supporters of tectonic theory and a sect of opponents, which Holden estimated at 10% to 20% of the group. Members from the geology department of Leiden University held a humorous event on campus to "bolt down" the Eurasian plate. For the 40th anniversary of the prank in 2018, the university brought Holden and his wife to campus, where Holden presented an unconventional pet theory that continental drift was not caused by heat currents but by the spin of Earth. and the "Friends of the Okanogan Lobe" (FOOLs), a group of retirees that makes local expeditions to study glacial geology.