Alfred Wegener

(This column was published in the July 20, 1992 Buffalo News.)

   Our understanding of that most remarkable and threatening natural 
phenomenon, the earthquake, remains limited. The weather bureau gives us 
accurate and timely warnings of tornadoes, for example, but similar earthquake 
warnings are no more available today than they were in 1835 when Charles 
Darwin recorded in his "Beagle" log a violent quake that demolished 
Concepcion, Chile.

   There had been warnings in Concepcion. Flocks of seabirds moved inland and 
dogs ran away up into the hills just hours before the quake. Survivors told 
Darwin that they simply had not known what those signals meant.

   Still we do know much today about earthquakes and the underground 
mechanisms that cause them. We know that the earth's crust is not static, that 
instead it is made up of huge plates that float in the deep molten mantle. We 
know that the Brazilian bulge and the matching indentation across the South 
Atlantic in Africa are not chance occurrences, but a result of two continents 
that were once one splitting and drifting apart over 150 million years. We 
know that mountain ranges like the Appalachians and the Rockies were wrinkled 
up by plate collisions just like an automobile fender in a car wreck. And, of 
course, we know that California earthquakes are caused by the Pacific plate 
rubbing against our North American continental plate.

   What many do not realize is how recently we came to this knowledge and how 
hard the geological establishment fought against the new theories. Because I 
believe that it is instructive today, here is some of the history of this 
theory before it was widely accepted.

   Alfred Wegener was a weatherman: he made many important contributions to 
meteorology. He was also a highly honored polar explorer who died on a rescue 
mission in Greenland in 1931. But in 1912 he had proposed his theory of 
continental drift to the Geological Association of his native Germany and in 
1915 his "The Origin of Continents and Oceans," the book that was to change 
our way of thinking, was published.

   Here is a small sample of the reactions to Wegener by respected geologists: 
His idea was "a fantasy...that would pop like a soap bubble," and the result 
of "delirious ravings of people with bad cases of moving crust disease and 
wandering pole plague." Such polemics were often accompanied by labels of 
Wegener as an outsider, "not a geologist," "primarily a meteorologist," and "a 
stranger to the facts." He was advised "not to honor geology with his presence 
any longer."

   You might think that it was his German origins that held up acceptance. 
Quite the contrary, he was least accepted in his own country. In 1926, his 
theory was debated at a meeting of petroleum geologists in New York City and 
it made slow inroads here; yet by 1961 only a fifth of over 200 major United 
States geologists had accepted the theory and in 1977, just 15 years ago, only 
87% of the same group believed in it.

   There is some justification for the slow acceptance. Wegener never 
correctly identified the mechanisms that cause continental drift and it was 
others who provided this foundation. Still Wegener's theory is correct. And it 
is widely believed today that it was exactly because he was not a trained 
geologist steeped in traditional thinking that he was able to reconceptualize 
this important field. (Just so, another weatherman, John Dalton, had 
redirected chemistry with his atomic theory in 1803.)

   I recalled this history when I attended a local meeting on mosquito control 
recently. Several speakers who had done much research and who tried to bring 
new thinking to this public health problem were challenged there because they 
had not earned the right degrees or taken the right chemistry and entomology 
courses. Could another Wegener have been among them?