When Continental Drift Was Considered Pseudoscience

One hundred years ago, a German scientist was ridiculed for advancing the shocking idea that the continents were adrift

  • By Richard Conniff
  • Smithsonian magazine, June 2012, Subscribe
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Alfred Wegener in Greenland
Alfred Wegener, in Greenland, c. 1930, was ridiculed as having “wandering pole plague.” (Alfred Wegener Institute, Germany)

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Six seismologists and a civil servant, charged with manslaughter for failing to predict a 2009 earthquake that killed 308 people in the Apennine Mountain city of L’Aquila, in Italy, will serve six years in prison. The charge is remarkable partly because it assumes that scientists can now see not merely beneath the surface of the earth, but also into the future. What’s even more extraordinary, though, is that the prosecutors based their case on a scientific insight that was, not long ago, the object of open ridicule.

[Editor's Note: The story was updated on October 22, 2012, to reflect the decision.]

It was a century ago this spring that a little-known German meteorologist named Alfred Wegener proposed that the continents had once been massed together in a single supercontinent and then gradually drifted apart. He was, of course, right. Continental drift and the more recent science of plate tectonics are now the bedrock of modern geology, helping to answer vital questions like where to find precious oil and mineral deposits, and how to keep San Francisco upright. But in Wegener’s day, geological thinking stood firmly on a solid earth where continents and oceans were permanent features.

We like to imagine that knowledge advances fact upon dispassionate fact to reveal precise and irrefutable truths. But there is hardly a better example of just how messy and emotional science can be than Wegener’s discovery of the vast, turbulent forces moving within the earth’s crust. As often happens when confronted with difficult new ideas, the establishment joined ranks and tore holes in his theories, mocked his evidence and maligned his character. It might have been the end of a lesser man, but as with the vicious battles over topics ranging from Darwinian evolution to climate change, the conflict ultimately worked to the benefit of scientific truth.

The idea that smashed the old orthodoxy got its start on Christmas 1910, as Wegener (the W is pronounced like a V) browsed through a friend’s new atlas. Others before him had noticed that the Atlantic coast of Brazil looked as if it might once have been tucked up against West Africa, like a couple spooning in bed. But no one had made much of it, and Wegener was hardly the logical choice to show what they had been missing. He was a lecturer at Marburg University, not merely untenured but unsalaried, and his specialties were meteorology and astronomy, not geology.

But Wegener was not timid about disciplinary boundaries, or much else. He was an Arctic explorer and a record-setting balloonist, and when his scientific mentor and future father-in-law advised him to be cautious in his theorizing, Wegener replied, “Why should we hesitate to toss the old views overboard?”

He cut out maps of the continents, stretching them to show how they might have looked before the landscape crumpled up into mountain ridges. Then he fit them together on a globe, like jigsaw-puzzle pieces, to form the supercontinent he called Pangaea (joining the Greek words for “all” and “earth”). Next he assembled the evidence that plants and animals on opposite sides of the oceans were often strikingly similar: It wasn’t just that the marsupials in Australia and South America looked alike; so did the flatworms that parasitized them. Finally, he pointed out how layered geological formations often dropped off on one side of an ocean and picked up again on the other, as if someone had torn a newspaper page in two and yet you could read across the tear.

Wegener called his idea “continental displacement” and presented it in a lecture to Frankfurt’s Geological Association early in 1912. The minutes of the meeting noted that there was “no discussion due to the advanced hour,” much as when Darwinian evolution made its debut. Wegener published his idea in an article that April to no great notice. Later, recovering from wounds he suffered while fighting for Germany during World War I, he developed his idea in a book, The Origin of Continents and Oceans, published in German in 1915. When it was published in English, in 1922, the intellectual fireworks exploded.

Lingering anti-German sentiment no doubt intensified the attacks, but German geologists piled on, too, scorning what they called Wegener’s “delirious ravings” and other symptoms of “moving crust disease and wandering pole plague.” The British ridiculed him for distorting the continents to make them fit and, more damningly, for not describing a credible mechanism powerful enough to move continents. At a Royal Geographical Society meeting, an audience member thanked the speaker for having blown Wegener’s theory to bits—then thanked the absent “Professor Wegener for offering himself for the explosion.”


Six seismologists and a civil servant, charged with manslaughter for failing to predict a 2009 earthquake that killed 308 people in the Apennine Mountain city of L’Aquila, in Italy, will serve six years in prison. The charge is remarkable partly because it assumes that scientists can now see not merely beneath the surface of the earth, but also into the future. What’s even more extraordinary, though, is that the prosecutors based their case on a scientific insight that was, not long ago, the object of open ridicule.

[Editor's Note: The story was updated on October 22, 2012, to reflect the decision.]

It was a century ago this spring that a little-known German meteorologist named Alfred Wegener proposed that the continents had once been massed together in a single supercontinent and then gradually drifted apart. He was, of course, right. Continental drift and the more recent science of plate tectonics are now the bedrock of modern geology, helping to answer vital questions like where to find precious oil and mineral deposits, and how to keep San Francisco upright. But in Wegener’s day, geological thinking stood firmly on a solid earth where continents and oceans were permanent features.

We like to imagine that knowledge advances fact upon dispassionate fact to reveal precise and irrefutable truths. But there is hardly a better example of just how messy and emotional science can be than Wegener’s discovery of the vast, turbulent forces moving within the earth’s crust. As often happens when confronted with difficult new ideas, the establishment joined ranks and tore holes in his theories, mocked his evidence and maligned his character. It might have been the end of a lesser man, but as with the vicious battles over topics ranging from Darwinian evolution to climate change, the conflict ultimately worked to the benefit of scientific truth.

The idea that smashed the old orthodoxy got its start on Christmas 1910, as Wegener (the W is pronounced like a V) browsed through a friend’s new atlas. Others before him had noticed that the Atlantic coast of Brazil looked as if it might once have been tucked up against West Africa, like a couple spooning in bed. But no one had made much of it, and Wegener was hardly the logical choice to show what they had been missing. He was a lecturer at Marburg University, not merely untenured but unsalaried, and his specialties were meteorology and astronomy, not geology.

But Wegener was not timid about disciplinary boundaries, or much else. He was an Arctic explorer and a record-setting balloonist, and when his scientific mentor and future father-in-law advised him to be cautious in his theorizing, Wegener replied, “Why should we hesitate to toss the old views overboard?”

He cut out maps of the continents, stretching them to show how they might have looked before the landscape crumpled up into mountain ridges. Then he fit them together on a globe, like jigsaw-puzzle pieces, to form the supercontinent he called Pangaea (joining the Greek words for “all” and “earth”). Next he assembled the evidence that plants and animals on opposite sides of the oceans were often strikingly similar: It wasn’t just that the marsupials in Australia and South America looked alike; so did the flatworms that parasitized them. Finally, he pointed out how layered geological formations often dropped off on one side of an ocean and picked up again on the other, as if someone had torn a newspaper page in two and yet you could read across the tear.

Wegener called his idea “continental displacement” and presented it in a lecture to Frankfurt’s Geological Association early in 1912. The minutes of the meeting noted that there was “no discussion due to the advanced hour,” much as when Darwinian evolution made its debut. Wegener published his idea in an article that April to no great notice. Later, recovering from wounds he suffered while fighting for Germany during World War I, he developed his idea in a book, The Origin of Continents and Oceans, published in German in 1915. When it was published in English, in 1922, the intellectual fireworks exploded.

Lingering anti-German sentiment no doubt intensified the attacks, but German geologists piled on, too, scorning what they called Wegener’s “delirious ravings” and other symptoms of “moving crust disease and wandering pole plague.” The British ridiculed him for distorting the continents to make them fit and, more damningly, for not describing a credible mechanism powerful enough to move continents. At a Royal Geographical Society meeting, an audience member thanked the speaker for having blown Wegener’s theory to bits—then thanked the absent “Professor Wegener for offering himself for the explosion.”

But it was the Americans who came down hardest against continental drift. A paleontologist called it “Germanic pseudo­-science” and accused Wegener of toying with the evidence to spin himself into “a state of auto-intoxication.” Wegener’s lack of geological credentials troubled another critic, who declared that it was “wrong for a stranger to the facts he handles to generalize from them.” He then produced his own cutout continents to demonstrate how awkwardly they fit together. It was geology’s equivalent of O.J. Simpson’s glove.

The most poignant attack came from a father-son duo. Like Wegener, University of Chicago geologist Thomas C. Chamberlin had launched his career with an iconoclastic attack on establishment thinking. He went on to define a distinctly democratic and American way of doing science, according to historian Naomi Oreskes. Making the evidence fit grandiose theories was the fatal flaw in Old World science, Chamberlin said; the true scientist’s role was to lay out the facts and let all theories compete on equal terms. Like a parent with his children, he was “morally forbidden to fasten his affection unduly upon any one of them.”

By the 1920s, Chamberlin was the dean of American science and his colleagues fawned that his originality put him on a par with Newton and Galileo. But he had also become besotted with his own theory of earth’s origins, which treated the oceans and continents as fixed features. This “great love affair” with his own work was characterized, historian Robert Dott writes, “by elaborate, rhetorical pirouetting with old and new evidence.” Chamberlin’s democratic ideals—or perhaps some more personal motivation—required grinding Wegener’s grandiose theorizing underfoot.

Rollin T. Chamberlin, who was also a University of Chicago geologist, did his father’s dirty work: The drift theory “takes considerable liberties with our globe,” he wrote. It ignores “awkward, ugly facts” and “plays a game in which there are few restrictive rules.” Young Chamberlin also quoted an unnamed geologist’s remark that inadvertently revealed the heart of the problem: “If we are to believe Wegener’s hypothesis we must forget everything which has been learned in the last 70 years and start all over again.”

Instead, geologists largely chose to forget Alfred Wegener, except to launch another flurry of attacks on his “fairy tale” theory in the middle of World War II. For decades afterward, older geologists warned newcomers that any hint of an interest in continental drift would doom their careers.

Wegener took the assault as an opportunity to refine his ideas and address valid criticisms. When critics said he had not presented a plausible mechanism for the drift, he provided six of them (including one that foreshadowed the idea of plate tectonics). When they pointed out mistakes—his timeline for continental drift was far too short—he corrected himself in subsequent editions of his work. But he “never retracted anything,” says historian Mott Greene, author of an upcoming biography, Alfred Wegener’s Life and Scientific Work. “That was always his response: Just assert it again, even more strongly.” By the time Wegener published the final version of his theory, in 1929, he was certain it would sweep other theories aside and pull together all the accumulating evidence into a unifying vision of the earth’s history. (But even he would have been astonished by the charges against the Italians for failing to turn continental drift into a predictive device; that trial is expected to continue for months.)

The turnabout on his theory came relatively quickly, in the mid-1960s, as older geologists died off and younger ones began to accumulate proof of seafloor spreading and vast tectonic plates grinding across one another deep within the earth.

Wegener didn’t live to see it. Because of a subordinate’s failure, he and a colleague had to make a lifesaving delivery of food to two of his weather researchers spending the winter of 1930 deep in Greenland’s ice pack. The 250-mile return trip to the coast that November turned desperate. Wegener, at 50, yearned to be home with his wife and three daughters. He dreamed of “vacation trips with no mountain climbing or other semi-polar adventures” and of the day when “the obligation to be a hero ends, too.” But a quotation in his notes reminded him that no one accomplished anything worthwhile “except under one condition: I will accomplish it or die.”

Somewhere along the way the two men vanished in the endless snow. Searchers later found Wegener’s body and reported that “his eyes were open, and the expression on his face was calm and peaceful, almost smiling.” It was as if he had foreseen his ultimate vindication.


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Comments (23)

Reading about Wegener reminds me immensely of the Expanding Earth theory. The criticisms against it are identical: scientists complain that there is no adequate explanation for the expansion. The proof is there and cannot be refuted, only denied. Thankfully, most thankfully, it will triumph as we now have the NOAA confirmation of the relative ages of the oceanic crust. Even more thankfully, the generation now living who continue to resist the truth are dying off and a generation will come that will be raised with the paradigm that the earth expanded, and Pangea will be relegated back to its rightful place as pseudo-science.

Posted by Doug Gibson on April 28,2013 | 05:03 PM

It's amazing how close minded people can down grade a scientist like Wegener. It takes some one who's brave and confident in there own beliefs to develop a thought like that and i value a persons time and listen to them even if i disagree... wish more people were the same way... or at least more respectful.

Posted by david johnston on January 15,2013 | 09:16 PM

this page help me with my science homework.

Posted by nathaniel montalvo on January 15,2013 | 07:49 PM

This is so long & most of it isn't relevant . Most of this stuff isn't even important . WHY PUT THIS ON THE INTERNET?¿?¿?¿?¿?¿

Posted by Emilee on January 15,2013 | 07:37 PM

I have a extra credit assignment in school the info i am looking for is what is the name that was given to the next continental drift in 200 million years

Posted by josh shelley on January 10,2013 | 05:24 PM

This is very helpful and good.

Posted by cima on December 13,2012 | 07:00 PM

These pictures are very old time... In science I was looking for him and yet , He was very popular .....

Posted by ariyana on December 6,2012 | 01:26 PM

This article help me understand better then my teacher did :)

Posted by Lydia on November 9,2012 | 02:56 PM

Early Greenland Expeditions The article caught me with great surprise, reading it as a subscriber. My uncle, Professor Dr. Eugen Wegmann, was on that same expedition, and I remember him telling us about Alfred Wegener, and their findings about the movements of the continents. These were the first expeditions to Greenland for geological research, and the first Europeans to spend the winter there. My uncle later led other expeditions for Denmark and for Norway, where he has a memorial stone at the University of Oslo. He had lectured at several American Universities, and received numerous honors during his lifetime, incl. Chevalier de la Legion d’Honeur, and after his death, was honored by the American Geological Society. Professor Eugen Wegmann was born and studied in Switzerland, spent many years for research in Scandinavia, and later became Director of the Geological Institute at the University of Neuchatel, Switzerland. He was born in 1895 and passed away in 1983. Verena Aeschbacher, Bellville, Texas

Posted by Verena S. Aeschbacher on September 29,2012 | 11:06 PM

How we interpret the science of centuries past cannot be separated from our view of modern science. The danger is that this view may be based on a stereotype. A common stereotype of a scientist is that of a rational professional that evaluates new ideas based only on an objective evaluation of data. This would leave the impression that, unlike early scientists, modern scientists proposing radical new ideas do not need to fear the reactions of those entrenched in the existing system. Alfred Wegener is one modern scientist amongst many that demonstrate that new ideas threaten the establishment, regardless of the century.

Posted by DOUGLAS TEINE on September 12,2012 | 01:32 AM

Regarding the article, “When the Earth Moved.” I think it is noteworthy that in Alan Moorehead’s book, Darwin and the Beagle (esp. pp.169-174 and pp. 155 & 167), he referenced entries from Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle. Darwin made mid-February observations about the 1835 Concepción Earthquake in which he imagined the concept of plate tectonics 75 years before Wegener articulated it. Darwin wrote, “…A bad earthquake at once destroys our oldest associations: the earth, the very emblem of solidity, has moved beneath our feet like a thin crust over a fluid; one second of time has created in the mind a strange idea of insecurity, which hours of reflection would not have produced. …We can scarcely avoid the conclusion, however fearful it may be, that a vast lake of melted matter of an area [here in Chile] nearly double the extent of the Black Sea is spread out beneath a mere crust of solid land. …Nothing, not even the wind that blows, is so unstable as the level of the crust of the earth.” David Hoyler Lee, NH

Posted by David Hoyler on July 27,2012 | 11:57 AM

No one denies climate change, it's been happening for billions of years; many do deny Al Gore's version of climate change... big differance.

Posted by ABCarowhina on July 22,2012 | 10:51 PM

Richard Conniff has succinctly described Alfred Wegener's battles with the geological consensus and the established wisdom of the day over continental drift. This should be required reading for today's consensus experts on global warming and climate change. Their often orthodoxical assertions have, unfortunately, made scientific skepticism a pejorative.

Posted by Ken Towe on June 21,2012 | 09:25 PM

Had Alfred Wegener been alive today to see the most recent data that the earth ocean floors are very young, he would have undoubtedly revised his theory once again and stated that he was incorrect about the continents drifting apart, because it is the Earth that is in fact expanding in size.

Posted by Terra Incognita on June 13,2012 | 01:41 AM

In 1947, in the 5th grade, I cut continents from maps and pieced them together and formulated a grade school theory of Continental Drift. Come on people. How could it have been that difficult for geologists to consider earlier in the century?

Posted by janes'_kid on June 9,2012 | 03:47 PM

It was the maps of Marie Tharp at Columbia University, drawn laboriously by hand from oceanographic data of Maurice Ewing and coworkers of ocean bottom topography that led to the theory of Seafloor Spreading and Plate Tectonics being taken seriously. I remember many vigorous debates about this subject when I first arrived at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in the mid 1970s. See: http://c250.columbia.edu/c250_celebrates/remarkable_columbians/marie_tharp.html

Posted by Jean Whelan on June 4,2012 | 08:33 PM

Please check your sources: the court judgement is not going on because they failed to predict an earthquake, but for the exact opposite reason: they said - a few days before the main earthquake events - that everything was fine and people could quitely sleep in their houses. That was a dangerousand fake statement, since you cannot predict when they happen but also when they *DO NOT* happen. So they caused general public confidence in what everybody was hoping at that time, lowering the alertness in such a dangerous way. No public officier shall ever say that "Everything is ok and go back to your homes", and facing judgement for that is correct

Posted by Daniele on June 4,2012 | 01:45 PM

Richard, My grandfather Stanley was a self-taught man in many ways. While born in the USA, he still had the Polish immigrant profile, as he spoke plainly but with a bit of an accent. He read the dictionary, the National Georgraphic, some books and the Chicago Tribune. He had a copy of a 1930 Rand McNally Atlas where he penciled in the Nazi capture of Poland and the rest of Europe and the subsequent Allied occupation. In that copy, two areas in the Arctic were still marked "UNEXPLORED". I think he had an inquiring mind and wanted to share his love of learning with us. In the early 60s I remember him bringing out a copy of an article about Wegener and "continental drift" from the Chicago Tribune. I clearly remember the article with the black and white pen and ink drawings of the changing shapes of the continents (showing the fit between South American and African plates). I am pretty sure it was a syndicated article that the Tribune published, rather than their own article. I would say that I saw it from 1963 to maybe as late as 1966. I wondered whether you have ever seen it. I have searched for this article (the web is amazing for the things you can turn up), but without success. I read your article in the Smithsonion to which we subscribe and I thought perhaps you have a lead on the publicity in the 60s that finally brought Wegener's theory to acceptance. I would of course like to know how to view this article again. What do you know? :) Best, --Bryan

Posted by Bryan T. on May 28,2012 | 09:03 AM

History and good research have the capacity to rehabilitate people (scientists, writers, etc), who, for their bold ideas, have been unfairly marginalized and even persecuted. Wegener's just one of many cases of discrimination by the establishment. Another amazing case of discrimination claims a total rehabilitation and a large apology: Alan Mathison Turing(1912-1954),an English mathematician and founding father of computer science. With his book 'On Computable Numbers', Turing laid the theoretical foundations of cybernetics. He was the victim of a terrible judicial and scientific persecution because of his homosexuality, and committed suicide.

Posted by Roberto C. M. on May 26,2012 | 08:50 AM

I can not open many pages with my iPad. I am especially interested in the plate tectonics/continental drift map. Any movement here. Get my drift? Thanks, Concerned reader

Posted by Frederic Thompson on May 26,2012 | 05:29 AM

Robert Dott, mentioned as an historian, is also a prominent geologist, emeritus Professor of Geology at the U of Wisconsin, Madison.

Posted by ssepsenwol on May 24,2012 | 09:19 AM

I always enjoy taking note of good science that collocates the scientific record of earth's history with the history as recorded in the Bible. As a Professional Land Surveyor, plate tectonics is of personal and professional interest to me. As a child I was taught the story of Creation as recorded in Genesis. Chapter 1, verses 9 & 10 reads: "And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so. And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good." I remember wondering about both the distribution of the continents and the "puzzle" shape as early as second grade, while actually fitting together a wood block puzzle to learn the names of continents, oceans and seas. Thank you for filling in a part of the history of plate tectonics that I was unuaware of. Sincerely, Charles Latham, PLS USA, NC

Posted by Charles Latham on May 23,2012 | 03:53 PM



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