The reason that the highest mountains are mostly in equatorial regions is because snow weight compresses the rocks. So the lower the height of the snow line, the taller the mountain has potential to be. Snow also erodes rock of course. So we can expect some other mountains to get higher with global warming. Maybe.
The theory of plate tectonics, despite seeming fairly obvious now, was widely disparaged for many years (it was first suggested in 1915), it wasn't until the late 1950s – early 1960s that it started to gain support (with newer seismological imaging techniques).
As a geologist (retd) I should know for sure, but I thought that the plate tectonics hypothesis began to be accepted as proven after magnetic mapping of the Atlantic showed up the north/south reversal stripes either side of the mid Atlantic ridge. Sea floor spreading was the only way to explain these phenomena, and hence the movement of the plates. This all came to pass only a few years before I went to Uni, and whilst it was accepted by then, it was a bit of a revelation.
IIRC, the magnetic mapping was a side-effect of wartime activity by the Navy, and carried on after the war.
But since I can't remember what I did last week, my memory could be defective on the subject. I could look it up, but, I can't remember where.........
