An Idea to Pursue - Four Revolutions in the Earth Sciences - page 52

An Idea to Pursue
The Jigsaw Puzzle
In 1911, Alfred Wegener, a young professor of meteorology, wrote to his sweet-
heart, a professor's daughter, to describe his excitement over a friend's new atlas.
“For hours we examined and admired the magnificent maps,” he wrote. “At that
point a thought came to me. Does not the east coast of South America fit exactly
against the west coast of Africa, as if they had once been joined? The fit is even
better if you look at a map of the floor of the Atlantic and compare the edges of the
drop-off into the ocean basin rather than to the present edges of the continents.”
He added, “This is an idea I will have to pursue.” 1
That same year the professor also wrote to the well-known German meteorolo-
gist Wladimir Köppen, his sweetheart's father and his future father-in-law, to point
out that the fit of the continents was far from the only evidence for continental
drift. Even more convincing was the presence of identical fossils on widely separ-
ated continents that “compel us to infer a land connection between South America
and Africa.” The identical fossil species can be explained either by the sinking of
a connecting continent or by the separation of two formerly joined continents, he
wrote. But according to new findings about the gravitational balance between con-
tinents and ocean basins, continents cannot sink. Exhibiting the naiveté and con-
fidence of youth, he added, “And if we now find many surprising simplifications
and can begin at last to make real sense of an entire mass of geological data, why
should we delay in throwing the old concept overboard? Is this revolutionary? I
don't believe that the old ideas have more than a decade to live .” 2
Insteadofthesingledecadethattheyoungscientist forecast,theoldideasdefied
death for six more decades. By that time, Alfred Wegener had been gone for thirty-
five years, frozen to death on the icy wastes of Greenland.
Contraction and Permanence
As with the other discoveries we are examining, the germ of the idea sprang up
long before it became a full-fledged theory. The first to conceive the notion that
the continents might once have been joined seems to have been, and not coincid-
entally, the creator of the first modern atlas: Abraham Ortelius. In 1596, Ortelius
proposed that the Americas were “torn away from Europe and Africa . . . by earth-