Wegener proposes continental drift
The continents have moved, and geology rejects the idea for fifty years.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 3 years
- Known to
- ± 1 year
- Era
- Industrial, Holocene
Wegener argues from 1912 that the continents were once joined, citing matching coastlines, identical fossils across oceans, and glacial deposits in the tropics. His proposed mechanism was wrong and the objection to it was reasonable, which is why the theory was dismissed, sometimes contemptuously. Seafloor spreading and palaeomagnetism vindicate him in the 1960s, thirty years after his death on the Greenland ice.