Geologists Unite Against Heresy - Four Revolutions in the Earth Sciences - page 77

FIGURE 7 . Bailey Willis (1857-1949). Source : Courtesy of Stanford University Archives.
In America, by the 1950s, continental drift was dead and buried. American geo-
logists educated in midcentury may well have never heard uttered the words “con-
tinental drift.” Yet the raw facts of geology remained. The forces that had folded
and faulted the Appalachians still came, as Willis and others had noted in the nine-
teenth century, from the southeast, where lay nothing but open ocean. Fossils of
Mesosaurus still lay embedded in identical rocks on two continents now separ-
ated by thousands of miles of water, and in between there were no foundered si-
alic blocks, no “uptrusions.” The Gondwanaland continents all had Glossopteris