Alfred Wegener ('continental drift' in 1915) is a geologist, and not a meteorologist



When he published his book in 1915, he was in his mid-thirties.

That also didn't help, although it is often going to be the case that new scientific ideas come from younger people.
 
chapter%201%20slide%2018.jpg


https://www.geolsoc.org.uk/Plate-Te.../Fossil-Evidence-from-the-Southern-Hemisphere

Although the evidence was strong.
 
I think the preferred geologic explanation of the time was land bridges which somehow collapsed.

Land Bridges ? ! ?

Yes, land bridges.
 

Driftless

Donor
The idea that continental size land masses move seems counterintuitive to the mind - especially minds raised on the notion that the world is at most only a few thousand years old. Feed in generations of creation myths and wifty incomplete science up to the early 19th Century

Still, when cartography becomes more complete and accurate by the 18th and 19th Century, the nifty nesting layout of the continents should have raised questions.

*edit* Think how long it took for William Smith's enlightening "The Delineation of Strata of England, Wales, and Scotland" to get compiled, published, and for its revelations to gain traction in the academic world. That work showed how malleable the earth's surface is.
 
Last edited:
Tbh I don't think him being a geologist would have made the ideas more accepted. A lot of geologists of the time came up with wild ideas and got shouted down because they went against the current orthodoxy. The field prior to the mid 20thC was heavily dominated by a few 'great men' that everyone else tended to parrot. In fact it is highly likely that if he was trained as a geologist he would be indoctrinated into the orthodoxy and wouldn't have the fresh perspective to come up with the idea.

The problem wasn't the lack of evidence, because there was a lot, but at the time they couldn't conceive the mechanism by which continental drift worked. It wasn't till the post second world war oceanographic and deep seismological surveys that enough was learned about the structure of the earth and the ocean floor, that workable theories were constructed.

As far as the scientists at the time were concerned Wegener's ideas were as outlandish as a modern person saying that EMF sensitivity is the cause for declining fertility rates.
 
Last edited:
But it's not so obvious with Eurasia and North America. It requires a bit of "Kit bashing".
Pangea.png


(And most of the "proper" geologists were either European or American.)
EDIT:by the time I took my Geology degree (78-81) Plate Tectonics was the orthodoxy. However it was interesting to listen to those Faculty members who had been taught land bridges. It really was a seismic (pun not really intended;)) change.
 
Last edited:

ninel

Banned
The problem wasn't the lack of evidence, because there was a lot, but at the time they couldn't conceive the mechanism by which continental drift worked.
This. Lot of people tend to not know (or forget) that the mechanism of the continental drift and its causes that Wegener proposed had not much in common with modern plate tectonics and were mostly wrong. What he thought, was that the lighter sialic continental blocks were kind of “floating” on the denser simaic ocean floor, and the movement was caused by earth’s rotation and tidal forces of the sun and the moon. That’s… not how it really works.
 
. . . Lot of people tend to not know (or forget) that the mechanism of the continental drift and its causes that Wegener proposed had not much in common with modern plate tectonics and were mostly wrong. . .
Honest to gosh, if a person simply watched a pot of thick oatmeal slowly boil!

Yes, Wegener was wrong on mechanism. But I just wonder if a number of simple everyday examples might get people playing with the idea of convention as the cause?
 
Last edited:
Honest to gosh, if a person simply watched a pot of thick oatmeal slowly boil!

Yes, Wegener was wrong on mechanism. But I just wonder if a number of simple everyday examples might get people playing with the idea of convention as the cause?
Convection isn't the cause of continental drift. That is a common misconception

The only significant movement of material from deep within the earth is at mantle plume hot spots such as Hawaii or Iceland.

Continental drift occurs due to a twinned pair of phenomena called ridge push and slab pull. Slab pull is where cold dense oceanic crust sinks back into the mantle, pulling the rest of the plate along with it. This caused rifts to open due to stress fractures in the plates, and the reduced pressure on the upper mantle below these fractures leads to melting. The melted material wells up to the surface and solidifies again to form new hot oceanic crust. The upwelling in the mantle and creation of the new hot, less dense crust is what creates the mid ocean ridges at the spreading centres, but not the movement itself. It's is gravity that causes the new crust to slide down the gradient in the unconfined mantle, pushing on the rest of the plate in front of it. Hence ridge push.

There is no complete convection cell.

A good quick of example of this can be found in Antarctica. The Antarctic continental plate is surrounded by spreading centres, mechanically no convection cell structure can exist to explain that.

Unfortunately mantle convection is still taught in most primary and secondary curriculum as it is easier to explain with the foundation of knowledge that children at the time have. Despite the scientific community knowing that it is incorrect since the 1970's.
 
_98110020_global_plate_tectonics_640_v4-nc.png


Plate tectonics: When we discovered how the Earth really works

BBC, Jonathan Amos, 2 Oct. 2017
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-41472281

"So, it looks as though something called ’trench pull’ is a very important force and it’s generally agreed to be larger than 'ridge push'. Of course, everything is connected in the deep mantle through convection, but trench pull does seem to be key."
Okay, so our friends in the UK are saying "trench pull" for what we call "slab pull." For example, the slab of dense oceanic crust sliding under Chile in South America, which also makes the Andes Mountains.

* and they also mention convection
 
Last edited:
There is no complete convection cell.

A good quick of example of this can be found in Antarctica. The Antarctic continental plate is surrounded by spreading centres, mechanically no convection cell structure can exist to explain that.

Unfortunately mantle convection is still taught in most primary and secondary curriculum as it is easier to explain with the foundation of knowledge that children at the time have. . .
I love this kind of tension! :) If I was teaching college or even middle school, I might even lead with it.




But with the Earth generating heat through decay of radioactive elements, doesn't there has to be some kind of convection?
 
Last edited:
But it's not so obvious with Eurasia and North America. It requires a bit of "Kit bashing".
View attachment 404920

(And most of the "proper" geologists were either European or American.)
EDIT:by the time I took my Geology degree (78-81) Plate Tectonics was the orthodoxy. However it was interesting to listen to those Faculty members who had been taught land bridges. It really was a seismic (pun not really intended;)) change.

My brother was a geology major at Ohio State at the same time you were studying the field. He said something similar and he said there was one really old timer in the department who refused to accept plate tectonics.
 
I love this kind of tension! :) If I was teaching college or even middle school, I might even lead with it.




But with the Earth generating heat through decay of radioactive elements, doesn't there has to be some kind of convention?

In the liquid outer core almost certainly. The mantle however is mostly solid and hence doesn't really convect that well. It is thought that some subducted crust from the surface can sink down though the mantle to the core-mantle interface, where it is fully melted, and this is the orgin for material in hot mantle plumes. This is not really a convection cell, as the rising plume is not connected to the spreading centre that it orginated from and tends to form in a single very localised spot. They also do not move in concert with plate movements, which is what gives the long Hawaiian island chain. Plate movement is entirely indpendant of the location of mantle plumes, which just would not work if mantle convection was an important process.
Convection probably does take place to some extent, the mantle isn't entirely solid (more a sort hot plastic gooey mess), but at very slow rates, and nowhere near enough to signficantly influence the tectonic plates.

It is thought however that mantle plumes are responsbile for the creation of the earliest contnental crust. In the early earth almost all of the surface would have been similar to modern oceanic crust, and would have sunk back into the mantle with some pretty rapid subduction to be replaced by new crust created at spreading centres. This would have created a lot of mantle plumes, which lead to a lot of volcanic island chains that then piled up in subduction zones and got stuck at the surface, over many millions and millions of years smashing together to form the first proto continents.
 
Last edited:
magnetic%20stripes.jpg

https://www.geolsoc.org.uk/Plate-Tectonics/Chap1-Pioneers-of-Plate-Tectonics/Vine-and-Matthews
. . . he said there was one really old timer in the department who refused to accept plate tectonics.
I wonder if that was part of his ‘schtick’ as an older fellow or something similar? For once we got symmetrical magnetic striping on both sides of an ocean ridge (sometimes crumpled in real world), that’s as much of a slam dunk as you’d like unless a person’s going to really grasp at straws.
 
..... It wasn't till the post second world war oceanographic and deep seismological surveys that enough was learned about the structure of the earth and the ocean floor, that workable theories were constructed........
———————————————————————-

Much of that geological research was funded by the military-industrial complex during the Cold War.
Cold War surveillance started with aerial photography to track enemy troop movements. Then they built faster, higher-flying airplanes to avoid AAA, then stratospheric balloons then eventually satellites. Many of those high-flying spy planes collected samples of radioactive dust from the upper atmosphere.
When atmospheric testing was banned, seismographs monitored underground testing of nuclear bombs.
Meanwhile, armies of oceanographers and geologists mapped ocean floors, all the better to track enemy submarines carrying nuclear missiles
 
Ato wrote:
Unfortunately mantle convection is still taught in most primary and secondary curriculum as it is easier to explain with the foundation of knowledge that children at the time have. Despite the scientific community knowing that it is incorrect since the 1970's.

“A wing generates ‘lift’ due to the faster air over the upper surface creating a ‘vacuum’ which lifts the airfoil”
“How does an airplane fly upside down then”
“…” “Your parents are Santa Clause and there’s no Easter Bunny”

There’s an XYCD for that IIRC J

“Dumbing” it down for the little ones has an unfortunate tendency to then be ‘accepted’ as the actual explanation WAY to often.

Besides if we have this silly ‘plate tectonics’ thing then how do we explain what happened to Atlantis, Mu and all those deep earth tunnels that all the conspiracy theories need to get around? Or how that would work with a Hollow Earth? Yeesh those are SO much ‘simpler” to understand after all…

Randy
 
Ato wrote:


“A wing generates ‘lift’ due to the faster air over the upper surface creating a ‘vacuum’ which lifts the airfoil”
“How does an airplane fly upside down then”
“…” “Your parents are Santa Clause and there’s no Easter Bunny”

There’s an XYCD for that IIRC J

“Dumbing” it down for the little ones has an unfortunate tendency to then be ‘accepted’ as the actual explanation WAY to often.

Besides if we have this silly ‘plate tectonics’ thing then how do we explain what happened to Atlantis, Mu and all those deep earth tunnels that all the conspiracy theories need to get around? Or how that would work with a Hollow Earth? Yeesh those are SO much ‘simpler” to understand after all…

Randy
you mean to say that the lost tribes of MU are not secretly moving the continents with their secret psychic, psychotic, psychokinetic toes?! HERETIC! :)
 
Top