20150507 - wegener (2)

Wegener and Continental Drift Theory

We are taught that modern scientists are driven only by reason and facts. It was only early scientists like Galileo who needed to fear the reaction to their radical views. Neither of these beliefs is true. The reaction to Alfred Wegener's Continental Drift Theory demonstrates that new ideas threaten the establishment, regardless of the century.
Alfred Wegener was the scientist who proposed the Continental Drift Theory in the early twentieth century. Simply put, his hypothesis proposed that the continents had once been joined, and over time had drifted apart. The jigsaw fit that the continents make with each other can be seen looking at the map of soil types below (derived from University of Idaho). South America can be dragged and rotated (rotating is tricky by touch) so you can try to see how well it joins with Africa.


 http://www.scientus.org/Wegener-Continental-Drift.html