Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
rejected for professorships of regular universities, mainly because he refused to confine his research
Wegener came up with the notion of continental drift around Christmas of 1910. He was looking
idly at a map of the world when he was struck by how snugly the coastlines of Africa and South Amer-
ica fitted together. They looked like two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. He suddenly wondered whether
they had once been part of the same continent, and had only later drifted apart. Intrigued, Wegen-
er began to find other evidence around the world that disparate continents had once been connected.
There were ancient floodplains of volcanic lava in Africa and South America, which matched like two
halves of a coffee stain. There were animal fossils of exactly the same types and mixtures on both sides
of the Atlantic. In place after place, the geology or the fossils matched uncannily between continents
that were now far apart. He concluded that the continents must surely move.
The idea was bold, intriguing—and widely derided. Most of the geological world immediately re-
jected it. They had been taught from birth that the Earth's surface was safely fixed in place, and We-
gener's alternative made them extremely uncomfortable. Wegener didn't help his case by coming up
with a preposterous mechanism to explain how the continents moved; he mistakenly believed that they
ploughed through the Earth's solid crust like an icebreaker, and at breakneck speed. It also didn't help
that he was a meteorologist rather than a “proper” geologist, and yet was putting forward geological
evidence to support his claims.
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But Wegener didn't give up. He pushed and harried and accumulated evidence, directing tireless
energy and determination into trying to prove his point. But before he could convince the world that
he was right, his curiosity finally killed him.
He died during an expedition to Greenland in 1930. The plan was to establish a station high on
the summit of the ice cap, where a few researchers would spend the bitter Greenland winter. Through
months of isolation and darkness, they would study everything: the wind, the weather, the stars, the
auroras, the snow, the ice. But the expedition encountered problems from the beginning. Unyielding
fields of pack ice stranded Wegener's ship off the coast of Greenland for an agonizing thirty-eight
days. By the time he finally broke through to reach land, the summer was half over. Though he sent
off his advance party to set up the central station, known as Mid-Ice, he was already worried that there
would not be enough time to supply it fully for the long winter ahead.
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Eventually, but very late in the season, Wegener set out for Mid-Ice himself. He took a team of
hired Greenlanders and fifteen dog-sledges weighed down with provisions. The conditions were ap-
palling, and after one hundred miles of blizzard and intense cold, the hired hands rebelled. Wegener
ploughed on with just two companions. By the time the three of them staggered into Mid-Ice, on 30
October, the temperature was fifty below zero, one of the party was badly frostbitten and they had no
supplies left to deliver.
The situation was desperate. Mid-Ice had scarcely enough food and fuel to supply its two present
occupants through the winter. There was no way that all three newcomers could stay as well. Wegener
celebrated his fiftieth birthday on 31 October, and, taking Greenlander Rasmus Willumsen with him,
he set back out again on to the ice.
The details of what happened next are sketchy, pieced together from the scant clues that Wegener
left behind. Around 160 miles from base, it seems that he abandoned his own dog-sledge, and started
to ski alongside Willumsen's. He always skied fast. “The journey must never come to a standstill,”
he had often told his companions on earlier expeditions. “The natural pace of the dog-sledges is the
normal speed to which everyone else must adapt himself.” Fine words for a young man. Not such a
good idea for a fifty-year-old, in half-light and bitter cold, on a surface that had been whipped up into
