Why wasnt wegeners theory accepted

By the s, Chamberlin was the dean of American science and his colleagues fawned that his originality put him on a par with Newton and Galileo.

Rollin T. 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 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 mids, 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.

The mile return trip to the coast that November turned desperate. Wegener, at 50, yearned to be home with his wife and three daughters. Somewhere along the way the two men vanished in the endless snow. The present is the key to the past is the foundational statement of uniform process.

Continental Drift challenged the idea that the continents were much the same today as in the past. These ideas were heresy to the community of Geological scientists had to be rejected. The timeline of evolutionary history as first outlined in was not compatible with the movements of the continents proposed by Continental Drift. The Geosyncline theory provided a means of explaining how the deep ocean fossils came to found in neat horizontal layers on the continents.

Gaylord Simpson a prominent evolutionary scientists opposed plate tectonics the modern form of Continental Drift up through the 's despite the strong evidence for the theory because of the difficulties in the evolutionary timeline. This was after a mechanism for the movement of the continents was found in seafloor spreading and convection currents.

The lack of a mechanism for Continental Drift was the excuse for the scientific community to reject the theory of Continental Drift. There was sufficient evidence at the time for the theory to be accepted. The contradictions to accepted theories was perhaps the main reason Continental Drift was rejected. Why did most scientists reject Wegener's idea of continental drift?

His attitude seems to have mirrored that of Galileo who, forced to recant Copernicus' theory that the Earth moves around the sun, is said to have murmured, "Nevertheless, it moves! His major problem was finding a force or forces that could make the continents "plow around in the mantle," as one critic put it. Wegener tentatively suggested two candidates: centrifugal force caused by the rotation of the Earth, and tidal-type waves in the Earth itself generated by the gravitational pull of the sun and moon.

He realized these forces were inadequate. Continental drift, faults and compressions, earthquakes, volcanicity, [ocean] transgression cycles and [apparent] polar wandering are undoubtedly connected on a grand scale. Wegener's final revison cited supporting evidence from many fields, including testimonials from scientists who found his hypothesis resolved difficulties in their disciplines much better than the old theories.

Climatology was one such discipline. Fossils and geologic evidence show that most of the continents used to have startlingly different climates than they do today. Wegener thought continental drift was the key to these climatic puzzles, so he and Vladimir Koppen plotted ancient deserts, jungles, and ice sheets on paleogeographic maps based on Wegener's theory.

Suddenly the pieces of the puzzles fell into place, producing simple, plausible pictures of past climates.