Fascinating piece. My only criticism: He omits any discussion of Wegener's opinons about antipodal continent creation. 
Vic
--- In geology2@yahoogroups.com, Lin Kerns wrote:
>
> The Earth Moved
>
> Posted by Richard Conniff on May 22, 2012
>
> *This is a story I wrote for the June issue of Smithsonian Magazine. The
> editors there asked me to write a different lead, to make it seem more
> timely. You can read that version
> here .
> But I think the historical account stands on its own. Feel free to
> disagree in the comments:*
>
>
> Alfred Wegener
>
> On November 1, 1930, his fiftieth birthday, a German meteorologist named
> Alfred Wegener set out with a colleague on a desperate 250-mile return
> trip from the middle of the Greenland ice pack back to the coast. The
> weather was appalling, often below minus-60 degrees Fahrenheit. Food was
> scarce. They had two sleds with 17 dogs fanned out ahead of them, and the
> plan was to butcher the ones that died first for meat to keep the others
> going.
>
> Less than halfway to the coast, down to seven dogs, they harnessed up a
> single sled and pushed on, with Wegener on skis working to keep up. He
> was an old hand at arctic exploration. This was his fourth expedition to
> study how winter weather there affected the climate in Europe. Now he
> longed to be back home, where his wife Else and their three daughters
> awaited him. He dreamed of "vacation trips with no mountain climbing or
> other semi-polar adventures" and of the day when "the obligation to be a
> hero ends, too." But he was also deeply committed to his work. In a
> notebook, he kept a quotation reminding him that no one ever accomplished
> anything worthwhile "except under one condition: I will accomplish it or
> die."
>
> That work included a geological theory, first published a century ago this
> year, that sent the world woozily sliding sideways and also outraged fellow
> scientists. We like to imagine that science advances unencumbered by messy
> human emotions. But Wegener's brash intuition threatened to demolish the
> entire history of the Earth as it had been built up step by step by
> generations of careful thinkers. The response from fellow scientists was a
> firestorm of moral outrage, followed by half a century of stony silence.
>
> Wegener's revolutionary idea was that the continents had started out massed
> together in a single supercontinent and then gradually drifted apart. He
> was of course right. Continental drift, and the more recent science of
> plate tectonics, are now the bedrock of modern geology, helping to answer
> life-or-death questions like where earthquakes may hit next, and how to
> keep San Francisco standing. But in Wegener's day, drift was heresy.
> Geological thinking stood firmly on solid earth, continents and oceans were
> permanent features, and the present-day landscape was a perfect window into
> the past.
>
> The idea that smashed this orthodoxy got its start at Christmas 1910, as
> Wegener (the W is pronounced like a V) was browsing through "the
> magnificent maps" in a friend's new atlas. Others before him had noticed
> that the Atlantic Coast of Brazil looked as if it might once have been
> tucked up against West Africa like a couple sleeping in the spoon
> position. But no one had made much of this matchup, and Wegener was hardly
> the logical choice to show what they had been missing. At that point, he
> was just a junior university lecturer, not merely untenured but unsalaried,
> apart from meager student fees. Moreover, his specialties were
> meteorology and astronomy, not geology.
>
> But Wegener was not timid about disciplinary boundaries, or much else: He
> was an Arctic explorer and had also set a world record for endurance flight
> as a balloonist. When his mentor and future father-in-law, one of the
> eminent scientists of the day, advised him to be cautious in his
> theorizing, Wegener replied, "Why should we hesitate to toss the old views
> overboard?" It would be like heaving sandbags out of a gondola.
>
> Wegener proceeded to cut out maps of the continents, stretching them to
> show how they might have looked before the landscape crumpled up into
> mountain ridges. Then he fit them together on a globe, like jigsaw puzzle
> pieces, to form the supercontinent he called Pangaea. Next, he pulled
> together biological and paleontological records showing that, in regions on
> opposite sides of the ocean, the plants and animals were often strikingly
> similar: It wasn't just that the marsupials in Australia and South America
> looked alike; so did the flatworms that parasitized them. Finally, he
> pointed out how layered geological formations, or stratigraphy, often
> dropped off on one side of the ocean only to pick up again on the other.
> It was as if someone had torn a newspaper sheet in two, and yet you could
> still read a sentence across the tear.
>
> Wegener presented the idea he called "continental displacement" in a
> lecture to the Frankfurt Geological Association early in 1912. The meeting
> ended with "no discussion due to the advanced hour," much as when Darwinian
> evolution made its debut. He published his idea for the first time in an
> article later that year. But before the scientific community could muster
> much of a response, World War I broke out. Wegener served in the German
> army on the Western Front, where he was wounded twice, in the neck and
> arm. Hospital time gave him a chance to extend his idea into a book, *The
> Origin of Continents and Oceans*, published in German in 1915. Then, with
> the appearance of an English translation in 1922, the bloody intellectual
> assault began.
>
> Lingering anti-German sentiment no doubt aggravated the attack. But German
> geologists also scorned the "delirious ravings" and other symptoms of
> "moving crust disease and wandering pole plague." Wegener's idea, said one
> of his countryman, was a fantasy "that would pop like a soap bubble." The
> British likewise ridiculed Wegener for distorting his jigsaw-puzzle
> continents to make them fit, and, more damningly, for failing to provide a
> credible mechanism powerful enough to move continents. At a Royal
> Geographical Society meeting, an audience member thanked the speaker for
> having blown Wegener's theory to bits–then also archly thanked the absent
> "Professor Wegener for offering himself for the explosion."
>
> But it was the Americans who came down hardest against continental drift.
> Edward W. Berry, a paleontologist at Johns Hopkins University called it
> "Germanic Pseudo-Science" and accused Wegener of cherry-picking
> "corroborative evidence, ignoring most of the facts that are opposed to the
> idea, and ending in a state of auto-intoxication." Others poked holes in
> Wegener's stratigraphic connections and joked that an animal had turned up
> with its fossilized head on one continent and its tail on another. They
> argued that similar species had arrived on opposite sides of oceans by
> rafting on logs, or by traveling across land bridges that later collapsed.
>
> At Yale, paleogeographer Charles Schuchert focused on Wegener's lack of
> standing in the geological community: "Facts are facts, and it is from
> facts that we make our generalizations," he said, but it was "wrong for a
> stranger to the facts he handles to generalize from them." Schuchert
> showed up at one meeting with his own cut-out continents and clumsily
> demonstrated on a globe how badly they failed to match up, geology's
> equivalent of O.J. Simpson's glove.
>
> The most poignant attack came from a father-son duo. Thomas C. Chamberlin
> had launched his career as a young geologist decades earlier with a bold
> assault on the eminent British physicist Lord Kelvin. He had gone on to
> articulate a distinctly democratic and American way of doing science,
> according to Naomi Oreskes, author of *The Rejection of Continental
> Drift–Theory and Method in American Science. *Old World scientists tended
> to become too attached to grandiose theories, said Chamberlin. The true
> scientist's role was to lay out all competing theories on equal terms,
> without bias. Like a parent with his children, he was "morally forbidden
> to fasten his affection unduly upon any one of them."
>
> But by the 1920s, Chamberlin was being celebrated by colleagues as "the
> Dean of American Scientists," and a brother to Newton and Galileo among
> "great original thinkers." He had become not merely affectionate but
> besotted with his own "planetismal" theory of the origin of the Earth,
> which treated the oceans and continents as permanent features. This "great
> love affair" with his own work was characterized, according to historian
> Robert Dott "by elaborate, rhetorical pirouetting with old and new
> evidence." Chamberlin's democratic ideals—or perhaps some more personal
> motivation–required grinding Wegener's grandiose theorizing underfoot.
>
> Rollin T. Chamberlin, who was, like his father a University of Chicago
> geologist, stepped in to do the great man's dirty work: The drift theory
> was "of the foot-loose type … takes considerable liberties with our globe,"
> ignores "awkward, ugly facts," and "plays a game in which there are few
> restrictive rules and no sharply drawn code of conduct. So a lot of things
> go easily." Young Chamberlin also quoted an unnamed geologist's remark
> that inadvertently revealed the heart of the problem: "If we are to
> believe Wegener's hypothesis we must forget everything which has been
> learned in the last 70 years and start all over again."
>
> Instead, geologists largely chose to forget Alfred Wegener, except to
> launch another flurry of attacks on his "fairy tale" theory in mid-World
> War II. For decades after, older geologists quietly advised newcomers
> that any hint of the drift heresy would end their careers.
>
> Wegener himself was exasperated but otherwise undaunted by his enemies. He
> was careful to address valid criticisms, "but he never backtracked and he
> never retracted anything," says Mott Greene, a University of Puget Sound
> historian whose biography, *Alfred Wegener's Life and Scientific
> Work*comes out later this year. "That was always his response: Just
> assert it
> again, even more strongly." By the time Wegener published the final
> version of his theory in 1929, he felt certain that continental drift would
> soon sweep aside other theories and pull together all the accumulating
> evidence into a single unifying vision of the Earth's history. He didn't
> pretend to know for certain what mechanism would prove powerful enough to
> explain the movement of continents. But he reminded critics that it was
> commonplace in science to describe a phenomenon (for instance, the laws of
> falling bodies and of planetary orbits) and only later figure out what made
> it happen (Newton's formula of universal gravitation). He added, "The
> Newton of drift theory has not yet appeared."
>
> The turnabout on Wegener's theory came relatively quickly, in the
> mid-1960s, as older geologists died off, unenlightened, and a new
> generation accumulated irrefutable proof of sea-floor spreading, and of
> vast tectonic plates grinding across one another deep within the Earth.
> Else Wegener lived to see her husband's triumph. Wegener himself was not
> so fortunate.
>
> That 1930 expedition had sent him out on an impossible mission. A
> subordinate had failed to supply enough food for two members of his weather
> study team spending that winter in the middle of Greenland's ice pack.
> Wegener and a colleague made the delivery that saved their lives. He died
> on the terrible trip back down to the Coast. His colleague also vanished,
> lost somewhere in the endless snow. Searchers later found Wegener's body
> and reported that "his eyes were open, and the expression on his face was
> calm and peaceful, almost smiling." It was as if he had already foreseen
> his vindication.
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