A middle school teacher of mine told us that, back in the 1950s, she noticed that the edges of South America and Africa lined up. Her teacher said that was nonsense. Which sounded suspish to me because how the fuck wasn’t continental drift already established by then? So I spent five hot minutes on google and realized that Jesus Christ on a crutch, continental drift only started to be accepted in the sixties.
Which is even more depressing when you find out that in the 1920s, the scientific establishment went on a campaign to goddamn destroy the first scientist who proposed it.
Today’s Moment of Science… The German meteorologist and continental drift.
It’s sometimes hard to wrap our heads around the fact that we’re floating on a chunk of rock, ice, and fuck fumes spinning around a glowing nuclear ball suspended by invisible forces and nobody’s quite sure why any of this is even a thing. The explanations for all of this regularly appear so bonkers they seem indistinguishable from science fiction. So when I recall the scientist who first attempted to explain how those chunks of rock shimmy across the planet, I’m not surprised that the reaction was “Alfred, all due respect, fuck yourself.”
So, Alfred Wegener.
Dr. Wegener was a German meteorologist which makes him sound like an unlikely hero in learning how continents move, but scientists often wear multiple hats. For this meteorologist, disciplinary boundaries were an adorable joke. He had a PhD in astronomy, training in geophysics, and was a pioneering polar researcher. As you do.
During his studies, as did so many of us, he looked at a globe and noticed the continents seemingly fit together. But instead of most of us who dropped it there, it planted a seed and Alfred refused to fucking let it go. Ever had a boss tell you “that’s impossible” and it just made you dig your heels in and think “YOU’RE NOT THE BOSS OF ME,” even if you’re thinking about your boss? Happens to accomplished polymaths too, apparently.
He compiled an imperial assload (which is four metric fucktonnes) of evidence for his hypothesis, published in the 1915 The Origins of Continents and Oceans. He suggested the Urkontinent, or the ‘primal continent,’ later named Pangea. He cut out the continents and made models for how they’d previously fit together snugly. There were several types of evidence supporting his claim. The ways the plates fit together like a jigsaw puzzle with geologic and tectonic clues formed part of his evidence. Glacial deposits and fossil records also seemed highly compelling, with there being no viable explanation for all these similar plants, animals, and glacial etchings in disparate corners of the Earth if they hadn’t been connected.
The thing we need to remember about Alfred Wegener’s hypothesis? Even though he was right and the evidence he provided was solid, his evidence was lacking something crucial: anything showing how the very land we walk on was traversing the planet like bumper cars. He thought they may have been as free floating as icebergs. But he just didn’t know, and neither did anybody else.
He was subsequently torn to shreds in the scientific community for it. He was ridiculed for changing the shape of the continents to match their hypothetical drift over time because, obviously, they could never have been shaped differently. Scientists thought this was a clear attempt to make the planet fit his theories. His ideas were called “delirious ravings,” symptoms of “moving crust disease and wandering pole plague.”
And here I thought moving crust disease and wandering pole plague are conditions that make you itch funny.
This was also right after WWI, and Wegener was subject to anti-German prejudices. His ideas were called “Germanic pseudoscience.” His credentials in geology were called into question, with another geologist stating that it was “wrong for a stranger to the facts he handles to generalize from them.” That geologist proceeded to demonstrate how the continents couldn’t possibly fit together. He did so by showing, in the shape they are today, that continents fit about as well as OJ’s glove. Ipso facto, they’ve never changed shape in 4.5 billion years, fuck this German meteorologist.
But over time, more evidence made Wegener’s ideas impossible to ignore. Finally, in the 1960s, Dr. Jack Oliver and his team confirmed what Wegener’s couldn’t; evidence of the plates drifting. They set up seismometers all over the world, measuring geological activity. From the evidence, it was impossible to see anything other than the obvious; the ground wasn’t just rumbling, it was going places. In 1968, he published Seismology and the New Global Tectonics, ushering in the knowledge that the very ground we stand upon isn’t immutable. It took a while for it to trickle down through the science books, but there it was, clear as the oceans that the continents parted for.
Wegener never gave up on continental drift despite the lack of support in the scientific community. He last presented on it in 1926, receiving next to no positive feedback. In 1930 on a sled dog expedition in Greenland, the weather dropped to -60 degree Celsius while he and his team attempted to resupply one of their research stations. He passed away on the trip at age 50. Today he rests in the same spot, a makeshift mausoleum under a hundred meters of ice and snow, the father of continental drift.
This has been your daily Moment of Science, asking if seisMOMeters are a thing, does that mean seisMILFeters are a thing?
(You’re welcome or I’m sorry)
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