and sextants to observe stars) and geologists, including Carey, plotting the geology onto the maps from exposures in the banks of streams. Carey was in the field when a magnitude 6.3 earthquake with an epicentre near Aitape occurred which devastated the inland villages and the tracks over the coastal mountains. He published a paper reporting on the event in The Australian Geographer. After four years in Papua New Guinea, Carey returned to Sydney and wrote and submitted a thesis for a Doctor of Science degree, entitled Tectonic Evolution of New Guinea and Melanesia. The degree was awarded in 1939. He returned to Papua New Guinea and worked there on oil exploration until the outbreak of the Pacific War in 1942. In 1940 he married Austral Robson, with whom he had four children. Carey served in World War II as a Captain in the special forces unit Z Force, developing a bold plan using small teams in folding kayaks to mine ships in an enemy harbour. This operation (Scorpion) became obsolete but Carey secretly tested his plan by infiltrating Townsville harbour, placing dummy limpet mines on American ships. After the war, Carey was a highly regarded contributor to geology and his many contributions to the emerging theories and proposals were often in advance of the accepted view. Maps and data produced from his field work in New Guinea were sought after by engineers and fellows. He backed the moving of continents proposed by Alfred Wegener and decided on the expanding Earth idea as the mechanism for this and was the main proponent of this hypothesis. Carey's expanding earth bears many resemblances to the current model, including supercontinents dividing and going adrift, zones of new crust being generated in deep oceanic ridges, and other phenomena of a still active crust. His hypothesis gave the mechanism for this as an expanding earth; whereas the new hypothesis of plate tectonics accounted for it with subduction. However, in principle, there is nothing incompatible between expansion, on a global scale, and subduction, on a local, or, regional scale, as discussed in detail by Andrew Kugler, who described the difference between subduction and overthrusting, which he argued can be discerned based on tectonic mapping, a distinction that is not generally recognized by most geoscientists. Although the expanding Earth hypothesis is nearly universally rejected by geoscientists, it has been defended recently based on detailed small-earth modeling by Klaus