A comprehensive study of the observations of seismology provides widely based, strong support for the new global tectonics that is founded on the hypotheses of continental drift, sea‐floor spreading, transform faults, and underthrusting of the lithosphere at island arcs. Although further developments will be required to explain certain parts of the seismological data, at present within the entire field of seismology there appear to be no serious obstacles to the new tectonics.Seismic phenomena are explained, in general, as the result of interactions and other processes at or near the edges of a few large mobile plates of lithosphere that spread apart at the ocean ridges where new surficial materials arise, slide past one another along the large strike‐slip faults, and converge at the island arcs and arc‐like structures where surficial materials descend.