ALFRED WEGENER AND THE THEORY OF CONTINENTAL DISPLACEMENT

Abstract

Alfred Wegener was an accomplished German natural scientist in the fields of meteorology, astronomy, and geology. He was also a skilled balloonist and participated in three scientific expeditions to Greenland. His primary research interest was in the relatively new field of meteorology. He held several academic or research positions in Germany before taking the Chair of meteorology and geophysics at the University of Graz in Austria in 1924. Wegener's most notable scientific contribution was a unified theory for the origin of continents. His mobilist idea of drifting continents contrasted sharply with the contemporary view of fixed continents and a rigid, shrinking Earth.

Wegener first presented his theory of continental drift in 1912 at a meeting of the German Geological Association. In 1915, he published his evidence and conclusions in a now-classic book, Die entstehung der kontinente und ozeane (The origin of continents and oceans). Wegener proposed that all modern continents were once assembled together in a supercontinent he named Pangaea. Pangaea, he thought, had existed since the beginning of the Earth and had begun breaking apart during the Mesozoic. He believed tidal forces were responsible for breaking up Pangaea and causing the continents to drift.

Wegener's theory of continental drift was generally criticized on both geophysical and geological grounds. However, post-World War II oceanographic evidence and development of plate tectonic theory in the 1960s have vindicated Wegener's basic conclusion that modern continents are drifted fragments of Pangaea.

Introduction

Wegener was an accomplished natural scientist in meteorology, astronomy and geology. He was a Greenland explorer and balloonist. He developed the hypothesis of drifting continents, a presursor to modern plate tectonics, but his ideas were not generally accepted until half a century later. Wegener was the son of an evangelical minister. He studied at the universities of Heidelberg, Innsbruck, and Berlin. He earned a Ph.D. in astronomy and was fascinated also by the new science of meteorology. In order to learn more about the atmosphere, he practiced the use of kites and balloons. He became a successful balloonist, in fact, and with his brother Kurt set a world record flight for balloon endurance of 52 hours. He also learned to ski and skate; he had ambition to explore the Arctic.

Wegener was selected to serve as the meteorologist on a Danish expedition to northeastern Greenland. Upon his return to Germany, he was appointed a junior lecturer in meteorology at the University of Marburg, where he wrote an important work on thermodynamics of the atmosphere. In 1912-13, he participated in another expedition to Greenland, which was the longest crossing of the ice cap to date. In 1913, he married Else Köppen, the daughter of famous meteorologist, W.P. Köppen. His life was interrupted for several years by World War I, in which he served as a junior officer.

Space-shuttle photograph of Greenland. View toward the northern horizon showing the southern and central portions of Greenland. All land and the ice sheet are snow-covered, and sea ice is present along the coast in this winter view. The exploration of Greenland was a major focus in Wegener's life. Space-shuttle photograph STS45-152-104, 3/92. Obtained from the NASA Johnson Space Center.

After the war, Wegener succeeded his father-in-law as Director of meteorological research at the Department of Marine Observatory, Hamburg. He was not well received. In 1924, he became Chair of meteorology and geophysics at the University of Graz, Austria, where he found colleagues more receptive to his research efforts. In effect, Wegener was rejected in his own country. He died (of heart attack?) on the ice, while leading a third expedition to Greenland at age 50.

Major work

Wegener's most notable scientific contribution was his hypothesis of continental drifting, which he first presented in 1912 at a meeting of the German Geological Association. In 1915 he published his evidence and conclusions in a now-classic book—Die Entstehung der Kontinente und Ozeane (The origin of continents and oceans). This work was completely contrary to contemporary views of the day.

Portrait of Alfred Wegener in 1912 during an expedition to Greenland. In the public domain; obtained from Wikimedia Commons.

Early 20th century geologists viewed continents as fixed features that could rise and fall, but not move sideways. Slow shrinking of the Earth was considered to be the cause of mountain building. Connections of former land bridges and sea ways supposedly could explain all stratigraphy and distributions of fossils. This was essentially the Atlantis mythof appearing and disappearing continents. Wegener noted several inconsistencies (Hallam 1975).

1. Close geographic fit of South America and Africa—like a torn newspaper.
2. Narrow mountain belts restricted to continental margins.
3. Isostasy of crust at two levels—oceanic and continental.
4. Distribution of certain fossils, such as Mesosaurus.
5. Distribution of ancient climatic indicators does not make sense.

A unified hypothesis for origin of the continents was Wegener's attempt to explain this situation. Eduard Suess had earlier proposed the existence of Gondwana(land), which was a megacontinent that included all modern southern continents (S. America, Africa/Arabia, India, Australia, and Antarctica). Wegener went one step further and proposed that allcontinents had once been joined in a supercontinent he named Pangaea (meaning all land). Pangaea, he thought, had existed from the primordial Earth until the Mesozoic, when it began to break up. Wegener at first considered mantle convection as a possible driving mechanism, but later rejected that in favor of tidal force as the cause for Pangaea's breakup and continental drift.

Wegener's best evidence was paleoclimatic indicators, and his best reconstruction of Pangaea was for late Paleozoic—Carboniferous and Permian (Schwarzbach 1986). His reconstructions include glaciation around the South Pole, tropical coal belt, and sub-tropical desert belts. In spite of overwhelming geological and paleoclimatic evidences in support of Pangaea, the idea was not generally accepted. The only strong support came from geologists in the southern hemisphere—the Gondwana region, where the geological evidence for Pangaea is most compeling. However, then as now, southern hemisphere scientists were few in number and well outside the "mainstream" of scientific thinking.

Portrait of Alfred Wegener in 1925. In the public domain; obtained from Wikimedia Commons.

Resistance to Wegener's hypothesis

Resistance to the hypothesis of continental drift came from two main sources—geophysicists and American geologists. Geophysicists were able to demonstrate that tidal force is far too weak to move continents through a viscous mantle. To accomplish this would require tidal forces so great that the Earth would be torn apart. Without a plausible physical mechanism for continental drift, many people considered the whole idea ridiculous. In 1926, the American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG) held a special symposium on the hypothesis of continental drift. AAPG was and still is one the largest and most influential geological organizations in the world. Nearly every aspect of continental drift was criticized.

American geology was held in high regard in the early 20th century, and such complete rejection of continental drift put an end to serious scientific discussion of the idea for the next four decades. It could be argued that AAPG was not an appropriate body to render a decision on Wegener's ideas considering the state of petroleum geology at the time. Oil and gas were produced only from land areas; no offshore oil wells were drilled until after World War II. Petroleum geologists were land-based continental geologists; they had no experience, interest, or appreciation for marine geology of the ocean basins. Furthermore, petroleum geology was (and still is) an applied aspect of the profession. The goal is to find oil and gas, not to understand basic principles of Earth history and global tectonics. In the early twentieth century, AAPG had no economic incentive to consider the possible implications of continental drift.

Aside from the apparent bias of the AAPG, several other factors may have contributed to the rejection of Wegener's ideas. These factors often come into play whenever a radical new theory is introduced into a mature scientific discipline.

1. Before his time – Wegener's hypothesis moved ahead of confirming evidence too fast. Many previously unrelated observations were combined into a large theoretical jump. This is contrary to the normal progressive, step-by-step development of science.
2. Youthful outsider – Wegener was a man of many talents, but he had no formal training in geology. Thus, he had no credentials. At the same time, he had no preconceived position to defend or prove. At the beginning of the 20th century, no scientist was recognized until at least age 40; Wegener was in his early thirties when he first proposed continental drift.
3. Scientific inertia – Geology could not remake itself overnight. There was natural resistance to change, to accepting radical new ideas. Geologists had vested interests in their work and were reluctant to admit past misinterpretations of fundamental significance.

With the view of historical analysis, it seems clear that Wegener and continental drift fit a pattern that has been repeated many times in geology as well as other scientific disciplines. As a discipline matures through time, complacency and authority develop, such that new ideas become increasingly difficult to accept. Those who are trained in the discipline learn a body of data, facts, methods, and theories that are taken to be literally true. To suggest otherwise may not be in the best interest of a person's reputation and career. Most practitioners of a discipline, thus, have "closed minds" to anything outside the normal dimensions of their work. This was the situation into which Wegener ventured with his hypothesis of continental drift.

Historical Assessment

Hindsight has, of course, vindicated Wegener's basic conclusion that all modern continents are rifted and drifted fragments of Pangaea. Key evidence came from oceanographic studies in the 1950s and '60s. Geologists were forced to accept continental drift as part of plate tectonics, as overwhelming evidence poured in from other disciplines. All this was virtually unknown to Wegener. Consider what was known and not known at the beginning of the 20th century.

State of geological knowledge at beginning of 20th century.
Well Known	Poorly Known
Geology of temperate lowland regions in Europe, North America, South Africa, India, Australia	Geology of tropical, desert, polar, and montane regions in South America, Asia, Greenland, Antarctica, central Africa, Arabia, etc.
Geology of oceanic islands—New Zealand, Hawaii, Iceland, Japan	Geology of all ocean basins
Relative ages of strata and fossils	Absolute ages of strata and fossils
Basic geophysics—magnetism, gravity, earthquakes	Interior structure of the Earth, radioactivity
Physical properties of rocks in near-surface environment	High pressure-temperature rock behavior

Wegener had good information about continental geology for a few regions, but the geology of many continents was poorly known or not even examined in some cases. Essentially nothing was understood about oceanic geology—even the most basic information was lacking for most parts of the world. Radioactivity had only recently been discovered, and its implications for geology and tectonics were barely appreciated. Even the age of the Earth was a subject of much debate, and virtually nothing was known about the deep subsurface of the Earth. In short, Wegener's hypothesis of continental drift was based on fragmentary information with a bias toward the better explored continents. This amounted to only about 10% of the Earth's surface. From this limited data, Wegener made a great mental leap to encompass the whole Earth in a global theory. Few scientists have ever accomplished so much with so little.

For Wegener, continental drift was interesting, but peripheral to his main focus in meteorology and Greenland. He made important contributions in both these subject areas, but continental drift is surely his most significant scientific work. He was not correct about certain aspects, for example the primeval origin of Pangaea or tidal force as the driving mechanism. Nonetheless, he got the basic idea right, and his hypothesis can be regarded as a forerunner of modern plate tectonics.

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	Except for a few converts, and those like Cloos who couldn't accept the concept but was clearly fascinated by it, the international geological community's reaction to Wegener's theory was militantly hostile. American geologist Frank Taylor had published a similar theory in 1910, but most of his colleagues had simply ignored it. Wegener's more cogent and comprehensive work, however, was impossible to ignore and ignited a firestorm of rage and rancor. Moreover, most of the blistering attacks were aimed at Wegener himself, an outsider who seemed to be attacking the very foundations of geology. The idea of continental drift was not accepted easily by the scientific establishment. Even though Wegener assembled many interlocking pieces of evidence to support his ideas, they were so radical that he was often ridiculed. Eventually, however, scientists made more observations, assembling the modern theory of plate tectonics. The above map shows an idealized schematic of the boundaries of the continental plates. (Map courtesy Discovering Plate Boundaries, Rice University) Because of this abuse,Wegener could not get a professorship at any German university. Fortunately, the University of Graz in Austria was more tolerant of controversy, and in 1924 it appointed him professor of meteorology and geophysics. In 1926 Wegener was invited to an international symposium in New York called to discuss his theory. Though he found some supporters, many speakers were sarcastic to the point of insult. Wegener said little. He just sat smoking his pipe and listening. His attitude seems to have mirrored that of Galileo who, forced to recant Copernicus' theory that the Earth moves around the sun, is said to have murmured, "Nevertheless, it moves!" Scientifically, of course, Wegener's case was not as good as Galileo's, which was based on mathematics. His major problem was finding a force or forces that could make the continents "plow around in the mantle," as one critic put it. Wegener tentatively suggested two candidates: centrifugal force caused by the rotation of the Earth, and tidal-type waves in the Earth itself generated by the gravitational pull of the sun and moon. He realized these forces were inadequate. "It is probable the complete solution of the problem of the forces will be a long time coming," he predicted in his last (1929) revision. "The Newton of drift theory has not yet appeared." Wegener noted, however, that one thing was certain: The forces which displace continents are the same as those which produce great fold-mountain ranges. Continental drift, faults and compressions, earthquakes, volcanicity, [ocean] transgression cycles and [apparent] polar wandering are undoubtedly connected on a grand scale. Wegener's final revison cited supporting evidence from many fields, including testimonials from scientists who found his hypothesis resolved difficulties in their disciplines much better than the old theories. Climatology was one such discipline. Fossils and geologic evidence show that most of the continents used to have startlingly different climates than they do today. Wegener thought continental drift was the key to these climatic puzzles, so he and Vladimir Koppen plotted ancient deserts, jungles, and ice sheets on paleogeographic maps based on Wegener's theory. Suddenly the pieces of the puzzles fell into place, producing simple, plausible pictures of past climates. Evidence of the Permo-Carboniferous ice-age era that peaked some 280 million years ago, for example, was scattered over almost half the Earth, including the hottest deserts. On Wegener's map, however, it clustered neatly around the South Pole—because Africa, Antarctica, Australia, and India had once comprised a Southern Hemisphere supercontinent (Gondwanaland). Wegener considered such paleoclimatic validation one of the strongest proofs of his theory. Conversely, continental drift has since become the organizing principle of paleoclimatology and other paleosciences. Unfortunately, though Wegener's explanation of the Permo-Carboniferous ice age impressed even his critics, the merit of much of the rest of his supporting evidence was not widely recognized at the time. As a result, most geologists eventually dismissed his theory as a fairy tale or "mere geopoetry." next: Vindication of a Visionary back: The Origin of Continents and Oceans		On the Shoulders of Giants Alfred Wegener  A Geographic Jigsaw Puzzle  Resume of a Revolutionary  The Origin of Continents and Oceans  The Wrath of Science  Vindication of a Visionary  The Obligation to Be a Hero Recommended Reading

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Despite general rejection, Wegener's compelling concept continued to attract a few advocates over the next several decades. Then, beginning in the mid-1950s, a series of confirming discoveries in paleomagnetism and oceanography finally convinced most scientists that continents do indeed move. Moreover, as Wegener had predicted, the movement is part of a grandscale process that causes mountain-building, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, sea-level fluctuations, and apparent polar wandering as it rearranges Earth's geography. Some of the earliest evidence confirming Wegener's theories of continental drift was revealed when geologists measured the age of the ocean floor. Crustal rocks near the mid-ocean ridges are always very young, while the ocean crust along continental margins, furthest away from the ridges, is hundreds of millions of years older. New ocean floor is being created at the mid-ocean ridges—pushing the continents along. (Map courtesy Discovering Plate Boundaries, Rice University) Geologists call the process "plate tectonics," after the large moving plates that form the planet's outer shell. These plates carry both continents and sea floor, but unlike the sea floor, the less-dense, buoyant continents resist subduction into the mantle. Thus, despite significant differences in detail, Alfred Wegener was right in most of his major concepts. Plate tectonics also confirms the accuracy of many of his paleogeographic reconstructions. Ironically, though the lack of a credible driving force was the main objection to Wegener's theory, plate tectonics has been almost universally accepted despite the absence of scientific consensus as to its cause. Convection currents in the molten magma of the upper mantle are the favorite candidate; Wegener discussed this possibility in his 1929 revision. During the last few decades, Alfred Wegener has finally gotten the recognition he deserves. Unfortunately, as with most visionaries, it must be posthumous praise. next: The Obligation to Be a Hero back: The Wrath of Science
Wegener returned to his beloved Greenland in the spring of 1930 as the leader of 21 other scientists and technicians. They were to systematically study the great ice cap and its climate. To carry out this ambitious program, Wegener planned to establish three observation posts at latitude 71 degrees N, one on the western edge of the ice, one on the eastern edge, and one at mid-ice. From the beginning, things went badly. Though the main party arrived in western Greenland on April 15, harbor ice hung on stubbornly until June 17, when they were finally able to land their 98 tons of supplies at the base of the ice cap. They were already 38 days behind schedule when they began to move up onto the ice cap to set up the western camp. On July 15, a small party headed inland, establishing the mid-ice camp, "Eismitte," on July 30. It was 250 miles inland at an elevation of 9,850 feet. (The eastern station was established later, by a separate party that landed on the east coast.) Because of unusually frequent bad weather, only a fraction of the supplies meteorologist Georgi and glaciologist Ernest Sorge would need for the harsh Greenland winter reached Eismitte in the next month and a half. Even the hut they were to live in and their radio transmitter didn't get through. Wegener had earlier written his brother Kurt of the polar explorer's "obligation to be a hero." This was doubly true for an expedition leader, so on September 21 Wegener himself led a 15-dogsled run to relieve Eismitte. He was accompanied bv fellow meteorologist Fritz Lowe and 13 Greenlanders. Because of poor snow conditions and bad weather, however, they covered only 38.5 miles the first seven days. Wegener wrote it was now "a matter of life and death" for his friends at Eismitte. As the relief party continued to struggle eastward, all but one of the Greenlanders gave up and returned to the base camp. Wegener and his two remaining companions finally reached Eismitte on October 30, after traveling 40 days. For the last five days temperatures had averaged -58 degrees F and a constant, frigid wind had blown in their faces. At Eismitte, the travelers were delighted to find that Georgi and Sorge had been able to dig an ice cave for shelter; moreover, they thought they could stretch their supplies through the winter. The heroic rescue run had been unnecessary, but there had been no way to let Wegener know. Fritz Lowe was exhausted and his feet and fingers were badly frostbitten. Wegener, on the other hand, "looked as fresh, happy and fit as if he had just been for a walk," marveled Ernst Sorge. "He was fired with enthusiasm and ready to tackle anything." Rasmus Villumsen, the 22-year-old Greenlander who had accompanied them, was also in good shape. Two days later, on November 1, the group gaily celebrated Wegener's 50th birthday. Then, because supplies were short and Fritz Lowe had to stay to recuperate, Wegener and Rasmus Villumsen, the wind now at their backs, set off confidently for the coast. Their friends would never see them alive again. The last photo of Alfred Wegener and Rasmus Villumsen, taken on 1 November 1930 (Wegener's 50th birthday) as they were leaving the "Eismitte" Station. (Photograph copyrightAlfred-Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research) When Wegener, Lowe, and Villumsen failed to return, those at the base camp assumed they had decided to overwinter at Eismitte. When April came with no word, however, they sent out a search party to make sure. Some 118 miles inland the searchers came upon a pair of skis stuck upright in the snow, with a broken ski pole lying between them. They dug around, but found only an empty box. Puzzled, they went on to Eismitte, but when they heard Wegener and Villumsen had left six months before, they hurried back to make a more thorough search. On May 12, 1931, they found Wegener's body. It was fully dressed and lying on a reindeer skin and sleeping bag stitched into two sleeping bag covers. Wegener's eyes were open, and the expression on his face was calm and peaceful, almost smiling. Apparently he died while lying in his tent. His friends thought Wegener probably suffered a heart attack brought on by the tremendous exertion of trying to keep up with the dogsled on skis over rough terrain. Rasmus Villumsen obviously buried Wegener with great care and respect, then presumably pressed on for the base camp, only to disappear into the white wilderness. Though a long, exhaustive search was made, the faithful Greenlander's body was never found. Wegener's friends left his body as they found it and built an ice-block mausoleum over it. Later they erected a 20-foot iron cross to mark the site. All have long since vanished beneath the snow, inevitably to become part of the great glacier itself. It is a most fitting resting place for this remarkable man who devoted so much of his life to the study of that remnant of the last ice age and whose vision of moving continents provided the key to the mysteries of more ancient glacial epochs.
Köppen, W., and Wegener, A. (2015) The Climates of the Geological Past / Die Klimate der geologischen Vorzeit.Reproduction of the original 1924 German edition and complete English translation. (Thiede et al., editors) Miller, Russell. Continents in Collision. Alexandria, Virginia: Time/Life Books, 1983. Schwarzbach, Martin. Alfred Wegener: The Father of Continental Drift. Carla Love, translator. Madison, Wisconsin: Science Tech, 1986. Wegener, Alfred. The Origin of Continents and Oceans. John Biram, translator. Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, 1966. Wegener, Else, editor. Greenland Journey: The Story of Wegener German Expedition in 1930-31, as told by members of the exposition and the leader's diary. Winifred M. Deans, translator. Glasgow: Blackie & Son, 1939. back: The Obligation to Be a Hero		On the Shoulders of Giants Alfred Wegener  A Geographic Jigsaw Puzzle  Resume of a Revolutionary  The Origin of Continents and Oceans  The Wrath of Science  Vindication of a Visionary  The Obligation to Be a Hero  Recommended Reading

When Continental Drift Was Considered Pseudoscience

More than 100 years ago, a German scientist was ridiculed for advancing the shocking idea that the continents were adrift

Six seismologists and a civil servant, charged with manslaughter for failing to predict a 2009 earthquake that killed 308 people in the Apennine Mountain city of L’Aquila, in Italy, will serve six years in prison. The charge is remarkable partly because it assumes that scientists can now see not merely beneath the surface of the earth, but also into the future. What’s even more extraordinary, though, is that the prosecutors based their case

It was a century ago this spring that a little-known German meteorologist named Alfred Wegener proposed that the continents had once been massed together in a single supercontinent and then gradually drifted apart. He was, of course, right. Continental drift and the more recent science of plate tectonics are now the bedrock of modern geology, helping to answer vital questions like where to find precious oil and mineral deposits, and how to keep San Francisco upright. But in Wegener’s day, geological thinking stood firmly on a solid earth where continents and oceans were permanent features.

We like to imagine that knowledge advances fact upon dispassionate fact to reveal precise and irrefutable truths. But there is hardly a better example of just how messy and emotional science can be than Wegener’s discovery of the vast, turbulent forces moving within the earth’s crust. As often happens when confronted with difficult new ideas, the establishment joined ranks and tore holes in his theories, mocked his evidence and maligned his character. It might have been the end of a lesser man, but as with the vicious battles over topics ranging from Darwinian evolution to climate change, the conflict ultimately worked to the benefit of scientific truth.

The idea that smashed the old orthodoxy got its start on Christmas 1910, as Wegener (the W is pronounced like a V) browsed through a friend’s new atlas. Others before him had noticed that the Atlantic coast of Brazil looked as if it might once have been tucked up against West Africa, like a couple spooning in bed. But no one had made much of it, and Wegener was hardly the logical choice to show what they had been missing. He was a lecturer at Marburg University, not merely untenured but unsalaried, and his specialties were meteorology and astronomy, not geology.

But Wegener was not timid about disciplinary boundaries, or much else. He was an Arctic explorer and a record-setting balloonist, and when his scientific mentor and future father-in-law advised him to be cautious in his theorizing, Wegener replied, “Why should we hesitate to toss the old views overboard?”

He cut out maps of the continents, stretching them to show how they might have looked before the landscape crumpled up into mountain ridges. Then he fit them together on a globe, like jigsaw-puzzle pieces, to form the supercontinent he called Pangaea (joining the Greek words for “all” and “earth”). Next he assembled the evidence that plants and animals on opposite sides of the oceans were often strikingly similar: It wasn’t just that the marsupials in Australia and South America looked alike; so did the flatworms that parasitized them. Finally, he pointed out how layered geological formations often dropped off on one side of an ocean and picked up again on the other, as if someone had torn a newspaper page in two and yet you could read across the tear.

Wegener called his idea “continental displacement” and presented it in a lecture to Frankfurt’s Geological Association early in 1912. The minutes of the meeting noted that there was “no discussion due to the advanced hour,” much as when Darwinian evolution made its debut. Wegener published his idea in an article that April to no great notice. Later, recovering from wounds he suffered while fighting for Germany during World War I, he developed his idea in a book, The Origin of Continents and Oceans, published in German in 1915. When it was published in English, in 1922, the intellectual fireworks exploded.

Lingering anti-German sentiment no doubt intensified the attacks, but German geologists piled on, too, scorning what they called Wegener’s “delirious ravings” and other symptoms of “moving crust disease and wandering pole plague.” The British ridiculed him for distorting the continents to make them fit and, more damningly, for not describing a credible mechanism powerful enough to move continents. At a Royal Geographical Society meeting, an audience member thanked the speaker for having blown Wegener’s theory to bits—then thanked the absent “Professor Wegener for offering himself for the explosion.”

But it was the Americans who came down hardest against continental drift. A paleontologist called it “Germanic pseudo­-science” and accused Wegener of toying with the evidence to spin himself into “a state of auto-intoxication.” Wegener’s lack of geological credentials troubled another critic, who declared that it was “wrong for a stranger to the facts he handles to generalize from them.” He then produced his own cutout continents to demonstrate how awkwardly they fit together. It was geology’s equivalent of O.J. Simpson’s glove.

The most poignant attack came from a father-son duo. Like Wegener, University of Chicago geologist Thomas C. Chamberlin had launched his career with an iconoclastic attack on establishment thinking. He went on to define a distinctly democratic and American way of doing science, according to historian Naomi Oreskes. Making the evidence fit grandiose theories was the fatal flaw in Old World science, Chamberlin said; the true scientist’s role was to lay out the facts and let all theories compete on equal terms. Like a parent with his children, he was “morally forbidden to fasten his affection unduly upon any one of them.”

By the 1920s, Chamberlin was the dean of American science and his colleagues fawned that his originality put him on a par with Newton and Galileo. But he had also become besotted with his own theory of earth’s origins, which treated the oceans and continents as fixed features. This “great love affair” with his own work was characterized, historian Robert Dott writes, “by elaborate, rhetorical pirouetting with old and new evidence.” Chamberlin’s democratic ideals—or perhaps some more personal motivation—required grinding Wegener’s grandiose theorizing underfoot.

Rollin T. Chamberlin, who was also a University of Chicago geologist, did his father’s dirty work: The drift theory “takes considerable liberties with our globe,” he wrote. It ignores “awkward, ugly facts” and “plays a game in which there are few restrictive rules.” Young Chamberlin also quoted an unnamed geologist’s remark that inadvertently revealed the heart of the problem: “If we are to believe Wegener’s hypothesis we must forget everything which has been learned in the last 70 years and start all over again.”

Instead, geologists largely chose to forget Alfred Wegener, except to launch another flurry of attacks on his “fairy tale” theory in the middle of World War II. For decades afterward, older geologists warned newcomers that any hint of an interest in continental drift would doom their careers.

Wegener took the assault as an opportunity to refine his ideas and address valid criticisms. When critics said he had not presented a plausible mechanism for the drift, he provided six of them (including one that foreshadowed the idea of plate tectonics). When they pointed out mistakes—his timeline for continental drift was far too short—he corrected himself in subsequent editions of his work. But he “never retracted anything,” says historian Mott Greene, author of an upcoming biography, Alfred Wegener’s Life and Scientific Work. “That was always his response: Just assert it again, even more strongly.” By the time Wegener published the final version of his theory, in 1929, he was certain it would sweep other theories aside and pull together all the accumulating evidence into a unifying vision of the earth’s history. (But even he would have been astonished by the charges against the Italians for failing to turn continental drift into a predictive device; that trial is expected to continue for months.)

The turnabout on his theory came relatively quickly, in the mid-1960s, as older geologists died off and younger ones began to accumulate proof of seafloor spreading and vast tectonic plates grinding across one another deep within the earth.

Wegener didn’t live to see it. Because of a subordinate’s failure, he and a colleague had to make a lifesaving delivery of food to two of his weather researchers spending the winter of 1930 deep in Greenland’s ice pack. The 250-mile return trip to the coast that November turned desperate. Wegener, at 50, yearned to be home with his wife and three daughters. He dreamed of “vacation trips with no mountain climbing or other semi-polar adventures” and of the day when “the obligation to be a hero ends, too.” But a quotation in his notes reminded him that no one accomplished anything worthwhile “except under one condition: I will accomplish it or die.”

Somewhere along the way the two men vanished in the endless snow. Searchers later found Wegener’s body and reported that “his eyes were open, and the expression on his face was calm and peaceful, almost smiling.” It was as if he had foreseen his ultimate vindication.