In the 1950s Walter Brian Harland was an advocate of the theory of continental drift, at a time when support for the idea was limited to geologists from South Africa and Australasia and most scientists in the northern hemisphere dismissed it as ridiculous. When, in the 1960s, evidence from the oceans showed that continents move because they are attached to the deeper mantle which is in continual slow movement, plate tectonics rapidly became established as the most important advance in geological science for over a century.
He made the radical suggestion that the Earth had been subjected to extreme glaciation about 600 million years ago. Current research by many scientists on climate change has recognised this work as forerunner of the "Snowball Earth" theory, that the entire Earth may have been covered with ice.
At Cambridge he became a Quaker, and committed himself to a lifelong interest in the relationship between science, philosophy and religion, although this thoughtfully spiritual side of his character was not revealed to most people. When the Second World War broke out he worked as a conscientious objector on a farm. Before the war, he had been developing a plan to work in China.
In 1942 he travelled to Chengdu to join the teaching staff at West China University to teach geology, and he was joined there eventually by his wife, Elisabeth, whom he had married earlier that year. He set about a programme of instructing his students in methods of survey and studying rocks. Various factors led to their return to Cambridge in 1946, where Harland had been offered a teaching post in the Department of Geology.
He also maintained a lifelong friendship with Joseph Needham, whom he had first met as a student in Cambridge, then in China. Needham became the leading scholar of the history of Chinese science, and Harland was a founder trustee of the Needham Research Institute in Cambridge.
Harland became the leading figure in compiling information on the geological timescale.
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