All This Rubbish - Four Revolutions in the Earth Sciences - page 136

Walter Bucher died in 1965, making his “Three Confrontations” article his last
wordondrift.Init,hedescribed himself as“oneofthosewhostill doubtthereality
of continental drift,” a position that he had staked out forty years earlier. 7 Unlike
Ewing, who also doubted continental drift but seldom troubled to say so, Buch-
er mounted a careerlong campaign against drift and when paleomagnetism arose,
attacked it as well. He befriended Runcorn and helped fund his research, but he
never accepted the evidence that Runcorn and the other paleomagnetists had un-
covered showing that the continents had moved.
As we will see in part 3 , Bucher was also the leading opponent of the view that
meteorite impact hasaffectedtheEarth,refusingfordecades toadmittheexistence
of a single terrestrial meteorite impact crater, finally making an exception only for
Meteor Crater, in Arizona.
Fossils Trump Geophysics
Harold Jeffreys was by all accounts the leading geophysicist of several genera-
tions, making vital contributions in a variety of branches of the subject. The Royal
Astronomical Society so respected his work that it named a lectureship for Jef-
freys, its only other named lectureship being in honor of George Darwin. In the
1963 inaugural lecture of the eponymic series, Jeffreys said that “continental drift
had been a subject of argument for fifty years, but has reached a new intensity in
the last few months.” 8 The scientific articles on the subject, he said, “are remark-
able for fallacious data, misinterpretations of the data, and omission to mention
any objections.” The fit of the continent is so poor that “the continued insistence
that the agreement is good makes one wonder whether advocates of continental
drifthavedoubtsabouttherestoftheircase.” 9 Hequotedthepaleontologist Daniel
Axelrod of UCLA: “There is no palaebotanical evidence that unequivocally sup-
ports palaeomagnetic data which ostensibly show that the continents have drifted”
(18). Jeffreys thus became the rare geophysicist willing to let the fossil evidence
trump the geophysical.
AreviewofthesixtheditionofJeffreys'sclassic textbook The Earth: Its Origin,
History, and Physical Constitution illustrates the difficulty of evaluating the work
ofagreatscientist whowaswrong,obstinately andunreasonably wrong,aboutone
of the most important discoveries in his field. The reviewer, Amos Nur of Stanford
University, began by calling the topic “a cornerstone of modern geophysics and
the earth sciences.” Writing in 1976, Jeffreys had ample opportunity to reconsider
his opposition to continental drift. Instead, as Nur wrote, Jeffreys showed himself