Abyssal plains were not recognized as distinct physiographic features of the sea floor until the late 1940s and, until very recently, none had been studied on a systematic basis. They are poorly preserved in the sedimentary record, because they tend to be consumed by the subduction process.
The first man to discover that the earth moves around the sun was an Italian scientist named Galileo Galilei.
1 Like the geocentric model, the earth was believed to be round. 2  The earth rotated, and thus the stars, sun, and planets appeared to move around the earth.  Mercury and Venus were closer to the sun than the earth and so always appeared near the sun.