🔄FROM THE ARCHIVE In the early 20th century, one man withstood a lifetime of ridicule to uphold the revolutionary idea that land masses move.
Scientific opinion shifts in the same way continents do — very, very slowly. Sometimes the change is so long coming that the author of a new theory doesn’t live to see his work vindicated. Sometimes he freezes to death, on an expedition in an Arctic wasteland, decades before his peers finally recognize him as a visionary.
Undoubtedly, his lack of credentials put him at odds with establishment academics from the start, but their scorn came also from a firm belief that the continents had always stood in more or less the same position. Many people had made the glaring observation that the continents fit together like puzzle pieces , but the dogma of continental permanence ran so deep that Wegener was the first to seriously consider its logical conclusion: At some distant time, they must have been joined.
, published in 1915. Its premise was that the Earth’s crust consisted of two layers, with the upper layer drifting constantly along the lower, like the icebergs he’d seen floating across the Arctic seas. More than 250 million years ago, he wrote, the continents of today formed a single, vast landmass which he named Pangaea . Surrounding this supercontinent was a superocean, Panthalassa .
. Still, he “believed that the quantity and variety of his evidence were so great that they amounted to proof.”The geologists of the world emphatically disagreed. After a couple of overlooked editions and an English translation, Wegener’s book sparked an intellectual firestorm in the 1920s.
Even in the controversy of those early days, though, the first traces of acceptance were visible. “We are discussing this hypothesis because we would like him to be right,” said George William Lamplugh at the Royal Geographical Society meeting, noting that it would solve many long-standing problems for geology. “The underlying idea may yet bear better fruit.”
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