Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
The Joke Is on You
By the mid-1950s, all who had spoken at the 1926 AAPG symposium or written
a chapter for the publication were dead. Daly, the only prominent American geo-
logist willing even to consider drift, had died in 1957. Students of the 1950s, now
two geological generations removed from Schuchert and Willis, might never have
heard of continental drift. The historian of geology Robert H. Dott, who was in
graduate school in the early and mid-1950s, recalls, “I had not heard of continent-
al drift or Alfred Wegener until a fellow graduate student—rather than a faculty
logy textbook used in the 1950s did not contain the words continental drift. As
Bailey Willis had urged, continental drift had indeed been banished from the cur-
riculum of geology.
One might expect that the geophysicists and oceanographers of the late 1950s
and early 1960s would be more amenable to the new findings from paleomagnet-
ism and the possibility of drift than the geologists. After all, the most convincing
new data came from the geophysics of the ocean basins. But some geophysicists
were even more opposed. In 1960, the Scripps professor Walter Munk (b. 1917)
published a topic titled
The Rotation of the Earth
with Gordon J. F. MacDonald
(1929-2002), a Harvard summa cum laude and geological prodigy who became a
designed to flaunt their own cleverness while snidely lampooning polar wandering
and continental drift. Instead of following where the paleomagnetic evidence led,
they tried to bar the door. “The easiest way out,” they wrote, “is to assign sufficient
strength to the Earth to prevent polar wandering.”
3
Arthur Schopenhauer is alleged to have said, “All truth passes through three
stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as
self-evident.” He may not have done so, but if he had the great philosopher would
theory, for the joke is apt to turn out to be on the poker, not the poked.
As noted earlier, John Graham of the Carnegie Institution had become suffi-
ciently discouraged by the initially confusing paleomagnetic results that he aban-
doned the field. In spite of having invented the successful fold test, Graham came
