Another Anniversary - 100 Years! Wegener's "The Origins of Continents and Oceans"
You can bet the climate deniers will hope this one passes without notice. Anti-evolution and climate denial and evangelical fundamentalism all correlate well.
So why wasn't Alfred Wegener's theory accepted sooner?
Wegener's 1912 paper and his 1915 book "The Origins of Continents and Oceans" were pretty convincing, but World War 1 interrupted research. Wegener was wounded twice, but soon continued his research after the war. He died in November, 1930 in Greenland while on the inland ice cap, and after measuring the ice thickness as 1800 meters.
Wegener revised "The Origins of Continents and Oceans" several times in the 1920's. Also in that decade translators made French, English, Spanish and Russian editions. The fourth German edition (1929) was translated by John Biram for Dover Books in 1966, and is still available!
Some fascinating facts:
Researchers using gravitometers mapped the Alps and part of the Himalayas. They found the massive roots of the mountains slanted downward, showing powerful forces could push up mountains.
Rifts also showed the continents moved. Submarine canyons extend out from many rift rivers - Congo river rift extends out to the 2000 meter depth. The Hudson river extends out to 1400 meters deep.
Archeologists and Geologists linked same age fossils and rocks all the way up the coasts of Africa and South America.
Wegener said the fossils also showed when the separations happened, as families continued to evolve. He said the Atlantic widened from south to north, making the split much wider in the south. Mostly using fossils, Wegener made maps for the Upper Carboniferous Eocene, and Lower Quaternary Epochs. The surface waves and transverse waves of earthquakes allowed estimates of the thickness of continental crusts.
Still unclear at that time was whether the poles were wandering (26 pages). The popular (with biologists) Atlantic and Pacific land bridges were disproved by numerous depth measurements in the oceans. Did you know they were laying transatlantic cable in 1866?
So, tremendous amounts of research, ignored mostly because the earth can't be more than 10,000 years old. As far as I can remember, I never heard the term "Ice Ages" in 12 years of Texas public education (1950's). Hooray for Alfred Wegener!