EXPLORE: Continental Drift (BrainPop)

Though he had many lines of evidence to support his idea, there was one flaw that caused most scientists to reject the theory of continental drift: he could not explain how the continents moved. When calculations were made to determine the size of force one would need to move a continent, it became clear that Wegener’s idea was not possible. The force needed to move a continent across thousands of miles of ocean floor so large that it would fracture the continent and it would not remain as a single landmass. If such a process had indeed happened, the shapes of the two continents would be vastly different from one another, having been broken, rearranged, and altered to a large degree by the gargantuan force. Thus, the similarity of the shape of the South American and African coastlines was simply a coincidence. If the two had moved 3000 miles apart, as Wegener proposed, they surely would have been broken into a zillion pieces by the very forces that were to move them. Wegener’s theory was simply unworkable; the geophysics did not support his assertions.

The process of scientific inquiry is one where a simple and seemingly well-supported idea can be brought to naught by a single piece of contradictory evidence. Wegener could not explain how the continents could be moved thousands of miles and still retain their matching shapes. This inability to explain the forces which would move the continents caused the scientific community to dismiss Wegener’s continental drift theory.

Undaunted by rejection, Wegener devoted the rest of his life to doggedly pursuing additional evidence to defend his theory. He froze to death in 1930 during an expedition crossing the Greenland ice cap, but the controversy he spawned raged on.

Source:http://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/dynamic/historical.html (public domain)