All the world's continents wrenching themselves apart from a single landmass would certainly qualify as a catastrophe.Īlthough Wegener introduced his theory of continental drift in writing in 1912, and published his book The Origin of Continents and Oceans in 1915, his work didn't attract much attention until 10 years later, after it had been translated from his native German into other languages. Catastrophism, the prevailing belief before uniformitarianism - and one influenced by the Old Testament - argued that the world we see is the result of extreme events like worldwide floods and volcanoes.
Thanks largely to Charles Lyell, 19th-century geology had adopted the theory of uniformitarianism, the idea that the world we see is the result of consistent cycles occurring over vast expanses of time. Even worse, his ideas rang of catastrophism. Some geologists felt that his research was hasty and selective. At a time when many geologists focused on rock dating and fossil collecting, Wegener took the then-unconventional approach of seeing the Earth as a whole. Few geologists of his day liked fantastic theories. Wegener was an astronomer and meteorologist, so he was something of an outsider to the geology community. But Wegener devoted much of his life to assembling evidence for the fit. Francis Bacon, Abraham Ortelius and Alexander von Humboldt all beat him to that. Wegener wasn't the first to notice how neatly the east coast of South America fit the west coast of Africa. It was an audacious idea, and geologists bristled with hostility. He further claimed that as continents moved around and smashed into each other, they formed mountains. Over time, Alfred Wegener came to disagree, and to conclude that Earth's continents had at one time been joined in a single landmass, which he named Pangaea.
#ABRAHAM ORTELIUS EVIDENCE SKIN#
From Science: A Four Thousand Year History by Patricia Fara.Īt the turn of the 20th century, the prevailing view of the Earth was that it was slowly cooling and contracting, and - like the skin of a rotting fruit - its surface was wrinkling to produce mountains and valleys.
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