What Is An Unacceptable Belief To Most Geologists

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Although Alfred Wegener was not the first scientist to propose the idea that the continents have moved, his 1912 outline of the hypothesis was the first detailed description of the concept and the first to offer a respectable mass

of supporting evidence for it. It is appropriate, then, that the theory of continental drift was most widely known as " Wegener 's hypothesis" during the more than fifty years of debate that preceded its ultimate acceptance by most earth scientists.

In brief, Wegener's hypothesis stated that, in the late Paleozoic ...
... era, all of the present-day continents were part of a single giant land mass, Pangaea, that occupied almost half of the earth's surface. About 40 million years ago, Pangaea began to break into fragments that slowly moved apart, ultimately forming the various continents we know today.

Wegener supported his argument with data drawn from geology, paleontology, zoology, climatology, and other fields. So impressive was his body of evidence that his hypothesis could not be ignored. However, until then 1960s, most scientists were reluctant to accept Wegener's ideas. There are several reasons why this was so.

First, although Wegener showed that continental movement was consistent with much of the geological and other evidence — for example, the apparent family relationships among forms of plants and animals now separated by vast expanses of ocean, once geographically united on the hypothetical Pangaea — he failed to suggest any causal mechanism for continental drift sufficiently powerful and plausible to be convincing.

Second, while the period during which Wegener's theory was proposed and debated saw rapid developments in many branches of geology and an explosion of new knowledge about the nature of the earth and the forces at work in its formation, little of this evidence seemed to support Wegener. For example, data drawn from the new science of seismology, including experimental studies of the behavior of rocks under high pressure, suggested that the earth has far too much internal strength and rigidity to allow continents to "drift" across its surface. Measurements of the earth's gravitational field made by some of the early scientific satellites offered further evidence in support of this view as late as the early 1960s.

Third, and perhaps most significant, Wegener's theory seemed to challenge one of the most deeply-held philosophical bases of geology — the doctrine of uniformitarian's, which states that earth history must always be explained by the operation of essentially unchanging, continuous forces. Belief in the intervention of unexplained, sporadic, and massive shaping events — known as catastrophism — was considered beyond the scope by mainstream geologists.

Wegener was not, strictly speaking, a catastrophist — he did not suggest that some massive cataclysm had caused the breakup of Pangaea — but his theory did imply a dramatic change in the face of the earth occurring relatively late in geologic history. Such a belief was unacceptable to most geologists throughout the first half of this century. For example, data drawn from the new science of seismology, including experimental studies of the behavior of rocks under high pressure, suggested that the earth has far too much internal strength and rigidity to allow continents to "drift" across its surface. Measurements of the earth's gravitational field made by some of the early scientific satellites offered further evidence in support of this view as late as the early 1960s.