When you think about it, isn’t it sort of crazy that the continents drift over time, and used to be joined together as a single landmass around 200 million years ago? What’s even crazier is that this only became consensus in the late 1960s. For the decades leading up to then, it was dismissed by most geologists, and called “Germanic pseudo-science”. It “takes considerable liberties with our globe” wrote one leading geologist. It ignores “awkward, ugly facts” and “plays a game in which there are few restrictive rules.” A brilliant new Works in Progress article by Elizabeth Van Nostrand (@acesounderglass) explains how the theory all came together and what convinced the skeptics. Continental drift was proposed multiple times over history, most famously by Alfred Wegener, who first laid out the theory in 1912 and compiled several lines of evidence: • the coastlines of South America and Africa fitting together • matching geological formations on either side of the Atlantic • glaciers on continents now too warm or too far from the poles to have had ice • fossils of the same species lining up across separate continents but not within them Wegener’s research was dismissed by many experts in part because Wegener did not have a background in geology, though it carried more traction in Europe than America. It gained steam again during the Cold War, from work funded by the US Navy to improve submarine navigation, which led to its rediscovery and rapid acceptance. Now, it is geology’s ‘theory of everything’, explaining volcanoes, earthquakes, mountains, and even geological records of the Earth’s magnetic field. This is On the origin of continents. Read it here!