A short history of nearly everything - Bill Bryson [86]
In Germany, however, Taylor's idea was picked up, and effectively appropriated, by a theorist named Alfred Wegener, a meteorologist at the University of Marburg. Wegener investigated the many plant and fossil anomalies that did not fit comfortably into the standard model of Earth history and realized that very little of it made sense if conventionally interpreted. Animal fossils repeatedly turned up on opposite sides of oceans that were clearly too wide to swim. How, he wondered, did marsupials travel from South America to Australia? How did identical snails turn up in Scandinavia and New England? And how, come to that, did one account for coal seams and other semi-tropical remnants in frigid spots like Spitsbergen, four hundred miles north of Norway, if they had not somehow migrated there from warmer climes?
Wegener developed the theory that the world's continents had once come together in a single landmass he called Pangaea, where flora and fauna had been able to mingle, before the continents had split apart and floated off to their present positions. All this he put together in a book called Die Entstehung der Kontinente und Ozeane, or The Origin of Continents and Oceans, which was published in German in 1912 and—despite the outbreak of the First World War in the meantime—in English three years later.
Because of the war, Wegener's theory didn't attract much notice at first, but by 1920, when he produced a revised and expanded edition, it quickly became a subject of discussion. Everyone agreed that continents moved—but up and down, not sideways. The process of vertical movement, known as isostasy, was a foundation of geological beliefs for generations, though no one had any good theories as to how or why it happened. One idea, which remained in textbooks well into my own school days, was the baked apple theory propounded by the Austrian Eduard Suess just before the turn of the century. This suggested that as the molten Earth had cooled, it had become wrinkled in the manner of a baked apple, creating ocean basins and mountain ranges. Never mind that James Hutton had shown long before that any such static arrangement would eventually result in a featureless spheroid as erosion leveled the bumps and filled in the divots. There was also the problem, demonstrated by Rutherford and Soddy early in the century, that Earthly elements hold huge reserves of heat—much too much to allow for the sort of cooling and shrinking Suess suggested. And anyway, if Suess's theory was correct then mountains should be evenly distributed across the face of the Earth, which patently they were not, and of more or less the same ages; yet by the early 1900s it was already evident that some ranges, like the Urals and Appalachians, were hundreds of millions of years older than others, like the Alps and Rockies. Clearly the time was ripe for a new theory. Unfortunately, Alfred Wegener was not the man that geologists wished to provide it.
For a start, his radical notions questioned the foundations of their discipline, seldom an effective way to generate warmth in an audience. Such a challenge would have been painful enough coming from a geologist, but Wegener had no background in geology. He was a meteorologist, for goodness sake. A weatherman—a German weatherman. These were not remediable deficiencies.
And so geologists took every pain they could think of to dismiss his evidence and belittle his suggestions. To get around the problems of fossil distributions, they posited ancient “land bridges” wherever they were needed. When an ancient horse named Hipparion was found to have lived in France and Florida at the same time, a land bridge was drawn across the Atlantic. When it was realized that ancient tapirs had existed simultaneously in South America and Southeast Asia a land bridge was drawn there, too. Soon maps of prehistoric