Today we all know about plate tectonics and continental drift, but more than 50 years ago belief in plate tectonics could have been a career ender. Interestingly, it wasn’t a geologist or even a geo-physicist that first came up with the idea of continental drift. The guy was actually a meteorologist named Alfred Lothar Wegener (Lothar, or the Hill People).
To quote Simon Winchester,
Alfred Wegener was German, an Arctic explorer, a meteorologist, pipe-smoking, taciturn, tenacious – Once described simply as “the quiet man with a charming smile.”
In 1915 Wegener published a book titled The Origins of the Continents and Oceans. In his book he coined the phrase die Verschiebung der Kontinente which translates as continental displacement but ended up being transformed in English to continental drift.
Wegener was, as Simon Winchester states, a generalist. Constantly pursuing any subject that would catch his fancy. He and his brother even held for a time the world hot-air balloon endurance record at 56 hours. By all descriptions Wegener wasn’t just a man of thought but of action. A brilliant mind that other small minded folk love to tear down and destroy. And for having the temerity to speak out against conventional wisdom, for stepping out of his chosen field, he was vilified and denied academic rewards and accolades. Wegener died young, at the age of 50 in November of 1930, a ‘figure of notoriety and ridicule’ according to Winchester. He died believing he was right.
At some point prior to Wegener’s book, he had been struck by the idea that the West coast of Africa and the East coast of South American seemed to fit together like a jig saw puzzle. Now Wegener wasn’t the first to contemplate this idea. Sir Francis Bacon, Georges-Louis Leclerc Comte de Buffon, Antonio Snider-Pellagrini, and Eduard Suess also had speculated on the existence of a super continent or connection between the continents. Building on this foundation, Wegener looked at fossil records, mineral deposits and surface features to work back from the present location of the continents to where he believed they all fit together. He believed there was a mechanism that broke apart the super continent and pushed the various continents to where they are today.
It wasn’t until the late 50’s early 60’s that Wegener was proved correct beyond a shadow of a doubt. What did it take? A little crystal of magnetite in basalt formations. You see when scientists compared the magenetic orientation of the magnetite to the current magnetic orientation on the surface, low and behold they were different. Beyond that, as you go down through the different layers of basalt, the orientations changed. The piece de resistance came when a researcher dragged a magnetometer behind a ship off the coast of Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia for months on end. What he found were strips of magnetic polarity caused by reverses in the earth’s magnetic field during the creation of sea floor.
Simon Winchester’s book Krakatoa, the day the world exploded August 27, 1883 was my primary source for this post. All in all a very entertaining read which I recommend to anyone.
