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02-03 Reading Text - The World on the Move

The document discusses the theory of continental drift proposed by Alfred Wegener, which suggests that continents were once a single landmass called Pangaea. Despite significant evidence and research, Wegener's ideas were initially dismissed due to prejudice, timing, and his lack of geological expertise. It wasn't until the 1960s that his theories gained acceptance, leading to recognition of his contributions to earth sciences.

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A14 04 Thảo Chân Huỳnh
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5 views

02-03 Reading Text - The World on the Move

The document discusses the theory of continental drift proposed by Alfred Wegener, which suggests that continents were once a single landmass called Pangaea. Despite significant evidence and research, Wegener's ideas were initially dismissed due to prejudice, timing, and his lack of geological expertise. It wasn't until the 1960s that his theories gained acceptance, leading to recognition of his contributions to earth sciences.

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A14 04 Thảo Chân Huỳnh
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© © All Rights Reserved
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The World on the Move

A. If you look at a map of the earth, you will observe that the different continents could almost fit together

like a jigsaw puzzle. For example, the east coast of the Americas fits very closely to Africa and Europe.

Antarctica, Australia, India and Madagascar fit next to the tip of southern Africa. In fact, we now know that

the continents were once a single mass of land, Pangaea, that broke apart as the continents were pulled

in different directions.

B. We also know how this happened. Below the solid surface of the earth there are layers of liquid rock

where there are currents, produced by rising heat. These ‘convection currents’ move in circles and pull

the surface of the earth along with them. This pulling effect is more powerful below the bedrock of the

ocean than below the land. Where the sea bed is pulled in different directions, cracks open up in the thin

layer of basalt rock. Hot molten rock then pushes through them to create new sea floor and the bottom

of the ocean spreads outwards away from the cracks. Where the ocean floor then bumps into a land mass,

it is forced downwards. Gravity continues to push it further, increasing the movement. The ocean bed

finally breaks up many kilometres below the earth’s surface. Not surprisingly, this complex process, called

continental drift wasn't obvious to anyone 100 years ago. And the man who proposed and proved that

continents were once joined together, Alfred Wegener, was not taken seriously in his lifetime.

C. Wegener had always been interested in discovery. Born in 1880 in Berlin he graduated in astronomy but

decided to explore other scientific disciplines, notably climate studies, because he worried that as an

astronomer he might not be able to make the great discovery he was searching for. During his lifetime he

was best known for his daring research in an unexplored region of Greenland’s north-eastern coast, where

he studied remote glaciers and winds high in the atmosphere.

D. His first writings on continental drift were published in 1912 after he had analysed rock samples on either

side of the Atlantic and found similarities in structures and in the types of animal fossils in both locations.

Yet despite his research efforts, his ideas were not well received. Some of this was due to timing. In 1914

the First World War broke out in Europe and Wegener joined the German army. Though he was unable to

continue his research at first, he was injured in 1915 and was able to return to academic life and publish his

key work The Origin of Continents and Oceans, though few people took much notice of it initially because

of the war.

International University, HCMC


E. Wegener too must take some responsibility for the failure of his ideas to become well known. Most

importantly, he was unable to decide upon a single theory for how continental drift happened. He considered the
correct theory briefly but then began to speculate that it was the circular movement of the earth that was pulling the
continents away from the poles towards the equator. He was also very inaccurate in some of his claims, calculating
that continents were moving at 125 cm per year when in fact the rate of drift was more like 2.5 cm, the speed at
which a human fingernail grows.

F. However, the prejudice of others certainly played a part. Wegener was just 32 when he published his

theories, and some people thought he was too young to be taken seriously. He was also from a country that had
been in a war against the United States, which dominated much of the academic establishment at the time. Perhaps
most importantly, he was not a specialist in geology and it was not easy for scientists to have influence outside their
areas of expertise at that time. Wegener was certainly not the only scientist who got a hostile reaction to his ideas
when writing about new subjects (famously, the physicist Luis Alvarez was also sharply criticised when he proposed
in 1980 that a meteorite killed the dinosaurs). Experts queued up to attack Wegener’s ideas, despite the very large
body of evidence that he collected during his lifetime. George Gaylord Simpson, for example, wrote angrily in 1943
that it was ‘almost unique in scientific history for (an academic) without special competence in a given field thus to
reject the all but unanimous verdict of those who do have such competence’.

G. This prejudice was made worse by the fact that Wegener was not an English speaker. One important

translation of his work into English in 1925 was particularly unpopular because it was not written in the cautious style
that is used in English-language academic writing. It sounded too confident, even dogmatic. Some say that lack of
English also made Wegener reluctant to defend himself. He was once criticised by a colleague who claimed that the
shape of the coastlines would have been very different millions of years ago and therefore it was ridiculous to
discuss how modern coasts fitted together. Wegener was there when this was said but didn’t argue, even though it
would have been easy for him to do so. After all, his theory was based on how land 200m below the ocean surface
fitted together, not the coastline.

H. Wegener died in 1930 attempting to measure the jet stream in Greenland. It wasn’t until the 1960s that his

ideas came to be accepted, when Harry Hesse discovered the correct mechanism of sea-floor spreading. Since
then, Wegener’s achievements have been celebrated properly. There are craters on both the moon and on Mars
named after Wegener, as well as the asteroid 29227 Wegener. In addition, the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar
and Marine Research, founded in 1980, carries on the valuable work that Wegener lived and died doing.

International University, HCMC

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