Happy Saturday. Alfred Wegener presented his ideas on continental drift before the Geological Association in Frankfort on January sixth, nineteen twelve, or one hundred and twelve years ago today, So our episode on him and the controversy about his research is Today's Saturday Classic. This originally came out December ninth, twenty nineteen. Enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. I really love historical disputes, especially when it's some kind of scientific or technical discovery or advancement, or some kind of medical something that people were arguing over, Like when I've been trying to figure out what to talk about next and nothing on my list is really grabbing me at the moment. Sometimes helped googling, like scientific disputes in history. This is one that I've been hanging on to for a while, and it's Alfred Wegener and the dispute over his theory of continental drift. And I really expected this episode to sound a lot like our previous one on Ignat Semmelweiss and hand washing, except geology, because that's how the story gets told a lot of the time, especially to a general audience. It kind of gets summed up as Alfred Wegener introduced his theory of continental drift and was basically laughed out of the academy, and then after his tragic and untimely death, he was proved to be more or less right and for a discovery that was as important to the field of geology as the discovery of DNA is to biology. But that is really not how this story goes at all. Alfred Wegener had a huge career outside of his ideas around what we understand today as plate tectonics. He did important and respected work that touched on a lot of different disciplines, and while there were definitely people who were very critical and even hostile when it came to what he called continental drift, he did have his supporters, or at least people who were willing to entertain the idea that he could potentially be right. Alfred Wegener was born Alfred Lothar Wegener on November first, eighteen eighty in Berlin, Germany. His parents were Richard and Anna Vigener, and they had five children, Three of whom survived infancy, Alfred was the youngest. His older brother and sister who survived were named Kurt and Tony. The men in the Wagner family typically went into the clergy, and that was also true for Alfred's father. He was a theologian and a classicist, and a pastor and an orphanage director. He also taught at the local gymnasium, but it was against the rules for Kurt and Alfred to attend the same school where he was working because he their father, so they attended a different school and both wound up pursuing an education in science rather than following that family tradition into the church. Kurt studied geophysics and Alfred studied at universities in Heidelberg, Innsbruck, and Berlin before getting a doctorate in astronomy in nineteen oh five. Even before finishing that doctorate, Wegener's interests went outside of what you might think of when we say astronomy. He had studied Max Planck's work on thermochemistry and thermodynamics, and some of the people he studied under for his doctorate were using planetary astronomy as a way to study the Earth rather than focusing on other planetary objects. He was also interested in weather and meteorology, and after finishing his degree, he started working at the German Aeronautical Observatory in Lindenberg. His brother worked there as well, and they used kites and balloons to study the Earth's atmosphere and atmospheric phenomena. At one point during this work, the Vegener brothers spent fifty two hours aloft in a balloon, which set a world record. Alfred Wegener was also part of the team that confirmed the existence of the stratosphere. Wasn't a team he was running, but he was involved in it. Waganer had been interested in Greenland since he was young, and in nineteen oh six he got the opportunity to go there as part of the Danish Denmark expedition, which intended to map Greenland's northeast coast. Wegener was the expedition's physicist and meteorologist, and his research involved more work with kites and balloons to collect atmospheric data. He also got a lot of practical experience in polar exploration. This expedition made its way through extremely inhospitable territory, so Wegener learned things like Arctic survival skills, and how to handle a team of sled dogs. On July tenth of nineteen oh seven, while they were on Cape Bismarck, Wegener and the team observed several water spouts. They took a lot of pictures and documented what they saw, and this experience may have inspired Wegener's interest in tornadoes and water spouts, which will come up again later in his career. Wegener kept journals during this expedition, documenting his experiments and their results, as well as the ordinary work that was associated with it, like setting up the equipment and keeping it maintained and repaired, and he also wrote about his own challenges as a member of the team. He had no experience in polar environments before this, and his knowledge of Danish was limited. Unlike many of the other scientists involved, he was also very early in his career and he hadn't really established a name for himself yet. This expedition achieved its objectives of mapping the northeast coast of Greenland, but it was also tragic. Several of its primary members, including leader Ludwigmilius Erickson, died after being stranded when the sea ice broke up around them. Even so, before it was even over, Wegener was talking about where he might go in the future, even considering an expedition to Antarctica as a future project for himself. In nineteen oh eight, after he returned from Greenland, Wegener moved to Marburg, where he started working at the Physical Institute in Marburg. In nineteen oh nine. He also lectured on meteorology and astronomy at the university there, and Wegener became particularly interested in atmospheric discontinuities, which are sudden, sharp changes in temperature or pressure. For example, there are discontinuity services around the boundaries of weather fronts and at the borders of atmospheric layers. Wegener wrote prolifically over the next three years, publishing more than forty scientific papers and then editing the ones on the subject into a book called Thermodynamics of the Atmosphere. This was a widely respected and referenced text on atmospheric thermodynamics for years, until it was ultimately replaced by a later book on the subject that Wegener also wrote. In nineteen ten, one of Wegener's colleagues brought an atlas into their office that was Richard Andres Algemini handatlas. This was one of the first atlases in Germany that included both the coastlines of South America and Africa and the basymmetry data, or information about the ocean's depths, that had been gathered by the expedition aboard the HMS Challenger in the late nineteenth century. So Wegener noticed something in this combination of data that intrigued him. He noticed that the eastern coast of South America looked like it would fit exactly against the western coast of Africa. And this wasn't just at the coastline at sea level. It was also part of the underwater topography off of the visible coast. He wrote a letter to Elsa Coppin, daughter of climatologist Vladimir Coppin. Vladimir Coppin had advised Wegener in advance of the Denmark expedition, and Alfred and Oas had started corresponding. Veganer wrote, quote, doesn't the east coast of South America fit exactly against the west coast of Africa as if they had once been joined? This is an idea I'll have to pursue. He didn't pursue it right away, though it seems to have kind of slipped his mind until about a year later when he read a newly published paper on paleogeography that documented fossils that had been found on both sides of the Atlantic. That combined with Wegener's earlier study of that atlas to put him on the path of formulating a theory of continental drift. And we will get to that after a sponsor break. Alfred Wegener was not at all the first person to notice that the eastern coast of South America and the western coast of Africa looked like they could fit together like puzzle pieces. I mean, this is an observation that children make the first time they experience a globe or an atlis that shows all of that. And people had been spotting that similarity starting as soon as there were maps showing both of those coasts. In fifteen ninety six, Dutch map maker Abraham Ortellius wrote that the Americas looked like they had been quote torn away from Europe and Africa by earthquakes and floods. Francis Bacon commented on it in his Nova Organum or True Suggestions for the Interpretation of Nature in sixteen twenty in a passage on similarities found in the natural world. He wrote, quote similar instances are not to be neglected in the greater portions of the world's confirmation, such as Africa and the Peruvian continent, which reaches to the Straits of Magellan, both of which possess a similar isthmus and similar capes, a circumstance not to be attributed to mere accident. By the nineteenth century, naturalists that also started to document animals, plants, and physical features that seemed to exist on both sides of oceans in a way that seemed impossible or at least really improvable, given that the ocean was there to separate them. There were rock formations on one side of the ocean that seemed to pick up again on the other side. Mesosauris fossils were found in both Brazil and South Africa, and there are freshwater trilobite fossils from the genus Para doxides that were found in both North America and Europe. Naturalists found living animals too, like lemurs which live in Southeast Africa, the island of Madagascar, and Southeast Asia. Even though there's a lot of water separating all of those. There were also coal beds on both sides of the Atlantic and seemed to be a part of the same system. And physical evidence of glaciers that had once existed in parts of the world now have tropical climates, and fossils of tropical plants and areas that are now polar. The list went on and on and on. So people started trying to come up with all kinds of possible explanations for how all of this stuff came to be. So for the animal fossils and the living animals, maybe they swam really was one, but kind of briefly that was easy to discount. It seemed incredibly unlikely that the animals in question could have swum that far, or maybe, I don't know, clung to a floating log all the way across the ocean. Maybe they swam. Explanation also didn't account for things like rock formations and glaciers that seemed to have existed in what seemed like the wrong place. Another popular idea was that at one time there had been land bridges connecting the continents, but that those had ultimately sunk into the ocean. This tied into another prevalent idea that the Earth had once been molten and was contracting as it cooled and solidified. It was a little like the surface of a plum as it dries into a prune, which could explain the existence of both oceans and mountains. That land bridge idea still had some problems, though, it didn't explain the rock formations that seemed to stop at one coast and then pick up again on the other side of the ocean, unless maybe those formations had been part of these land bridges that were now underwater. But then there also wasn't a clear answer to what could have caused the land bridges to sink, if they had ever existed. In eighteen fifty eight, Antonio Snyder Pellegrini argued that maybe Africa and South America had been one continent at some point point in the past. He suggested that the continents had been forced apart in the flood that is described in the biblical Book of Genesis. Then a few decades later, when radioactivity was discovered in eighteen ninety six, that raised more questions about this general idea that the earth was molten and was just contracting as it cooled. How could that be happening if there were radioactive materials within the Earth that were giving off heat. On December twenty ninth, nineteen oh eight, American geologist Frank B. Taylor gave a presentation to the Geological Society of America in which he suggested that the continents were moving and had been pulled apart by lunar gravity. He thought that the collisions of the continents had pushed mountains into being, and that the continence movement had also left deep tears in the oceans. He published a paper in nineteen ten, and other papers followed. It is definitely possible that Wegener read Taylor's nineteen ten paper or one of the ones that followed, and for a while the theory of continental drift was actually called the Tailor Veganer hypothesis. In nineteen thirty two, though Taylor said that his name should be dropped off from the descriptor because other than the basic idea that the continents were moving, his ideas were really different from Veginer's. Here's what Veganer thought was going on. He thought that the planet was made from concentric layers of material, which were denser the further down you go, and the outermost layer, with the continents on it was not contiguous. Oceans filled in any gaps. The continent layer was made of seal material that's largely silicon and aluminum, and the ocean floors were sema that's silicon and magnesium. Seal was less dense than sema, so the seal continents could float along the sema ocean floor, kind of like icebergs float on the ocean. Veginer thought that at some point, about two hundred million years ago, all the continents had been connected into one land mass that he called Pangaea, and then something had broken them apart and allowed them to mindgrate around the Earth. He thought this motion explained how mountains formed. It wasn't that the Earth was cooling and shrinking like a prune, or that mountains were being pushed up by the force of colliding continents. He thought they were formed by the resistance that the continents experienced as they were sort of pllowing through the ocean floor beneath them, sort of like the way a tablecloth wrinkles if you try to push it across the table. Veginer also thought that islands were pieces that had broken off the continents as they were moving. Veganer was not entirely sure what was providing the energy needed for the continents to move. He proposed several possibilities, and the one that he focused on the most was that it was some kind of energy related to irregularities in the planet's rotation on its axis. Wagner detailed all this in two papers published in nineteen eleven and nineteen twelve, both titled The Origin of Continents. He cited evidence from several different fields, including geology, paleontology, geophysics, and geotesy, and on January sixth of nineteen twelve he spoke about these ideas before the Geological Association in Frankfurt, and then he presented on it at the Society for the Advancement of Natural Science in Marburg, Germany a few days after that. This was just dramatically different from how most scientists understood the world at the time, and to be clear, it's really not how we understand it today either. But it also wasn't the only hypothesis out there. Other geologists had also put forth various ideas about how the Earth's continents might have been joined together at some point in the distant past. Basically, it was clear that the whole model of the Earth as a molten object that was cooling and contracting just wasn't correct, So a lot of scientists were trying to figure out what really was happening. Wegener had some supporters, or at least people who thought he might be onto something. These were especially people who had personally seen or already knew about some of the evidence that he had cited, But he also had plenty of detractors. Some of this was rooted in the details of his work. For example, he said that Greenland was moving at about one hundred and twenty feet or thirty six meters a year. That was an error, and it was easily disproved. It also didn't seem like slight irregularities in the Earth's rotation could have provided nearly enough energy to move entire continents, especially if those continents were plowing their way through a less dense layer of the planet underneath them. Some of the people who disagreed with Wegener were particularly scathing about it. For example, doctor Rollin T. Chamberlain of the University of Chicago said, quote Veganer's hypothesis in general is of the footloose type, in that it takes considerable liberty with our globe and is less bound by restrictions or tied down by awkward, ugly facts than most of its rival theories. So this wasn't really a case of one man, Alfred Wegener against the whole of science. Enough people thought he was at least partially correct that they became known as the mobilists, while people who disagreed were called the anti mobilist or the fixists. This was not the end of Wegener's work on his continental drift theory, but he did keep working on lots of other stuff during his career, and we're going to talk a little bit more about that after we pause for a sponsor break. Alfred Wegener took another expedition to Greenland starting in nineteen twelve. This was another treacherous expedition meant to cross and survey the Greenland ice sheet from east to west, including spending the entire winter out there on the ice sheet. At one point, a glacier that the team was on unexpectedly calved, and Veganer wrote that they quote escaped death only by a miracle. Veginer and Elsa Coppin that we mentioned earlier had gotten engaged before that expedition, and they married after he returned in nineteen thirteen. They would eventually have three daughters together. Ess was a translator, translating scientific works, including some by her husband. She also published a biography of Alfred, including parts of his notes and journals after his death. Wegener's work as a scientist and a researcher was interrupted by World War One. He served in the German Army, first as a lieutenant and then as a captain. He was wounded twice, once on August twenty third, nineteen fourteen, in Belgium, and then once again in France on October fourth of that same year. That second injury was a lot worse. He was shot in the neck and had to go home to recover. He used that recovery time to write his book, The Origin of Continents and Oceans, which expanded on his earlier ideas around continental drift. Once Wegener was sufficiently recovered, he returned to the army, this time serving with the Field Weather Service as a meteorologist. This was not a particularly taxing assignment. He was stationed on the Western Front, which was a dangerous place to be, but his daily duties mostly involved making some routine weather observations, so he spent this time on study and research, writing a paper called on the formation of Hoarfrost on horse corpses, as well as a book called Tornadoes and Waterspouts in Europe. This book pulled together information on two hundred and fifty eight reported tornadoes that had struck in Europe between fourteen fifty six and nineteen thirteen. Because he could only get to one library to do his research because he was literally stationed at the Western Front during a war, most of the tornadoes in question were in Western Europe, reasonably near where he was stationed. This was the first Pan European book on tornado climatology, and it was really thorough. His intent was not to speculate on the causes of tornadoes and waterspouts, which was not settled at that point. It was instead to pull together a wealth of data on how large the tornadoes were and when and where they struck and how they moved, along with other details like what they smelled and sounded like and any electrical phenomena associated with them. On April third of nineteen sixteen, while Vegener was at home in Marburg for Easter, a meteorite struck outside the nearby town of Treesa. Two professors from the University of Marbor got in touch with Wegener about trying to figure out where this meteorite had fallen. So Wegener cross referenced newspaper accounts and eyewitness statements try to calculate its trajectory, eventually requesting some additional leave from the army to try to finish up this work. When the meteorite's remains were found on March fifth of nineteen seventeen, they were very close to the spot that he had predicted. Later in World War One, Wegener was transferred to the Eastern Front and then back to the Western Front. He kept working on his book on tornadoes, which came out in nineteen seventeen. Once the war was over, Weginar had trouble finding work at a university, and this seems to have been at least as much about economic conditions as it was about his controversial theories about how the earth worked. He and Elsa eventually moved in with her father, and Alfred went to work at the German Marine Weather Observatory, in a position that his father in law had previously held. Begener held his position for five years, and he did have teaching privileges at the university of Hamburg. In nineteen twenty one, Wegner published research on the causes of lunar craters. At the time, there were four primary hypotheses about what had caused the craters on the lunar surface. That they were the remnants of some kind of bubbles that had collapsed, That they had been caused by tidal forces, that they were volcanoes, or that they were the aftermath of meteorite impacts. Wegener used cement powder to simulate both the lunar surface and the meteorites, basically throwing little bits of cement powder at a layer of cement powder with a teaspoon. Then he would carefully missed the surface of the simulated moon to set the powder. Once that was done, he would measure and document the craters that had been formed. In the pamphlet that he published on this subject, Wegener outlined various arguments against the other three hypotheses before detailing how these simulations supported the idea that meteorite impacts had caused the creators on the moon. I love this so much, honestly so do I. It's Alfred Wegener's crafty time that is very scientifically grounded. I love it it's simultaneously very charming and really cool. It's ingenius. In nineteen twenty two, Wegener published another edition of his book on the Origins of Continents, and this one was translated into several languages. It was still a controversial work, but it was not unanimously dismissed. Two years later, in nineteen twenty four, Vegener and his father in law published a book called Climates of the Geological Past. That same year, Begener became a professor at the University of Grutz, where he was the chair of the departments of Meteorology and Geophysics. He also published another expanded edition of his earlier work on continental drift, this one also called The Origin of Continents and Oceans. By nineteen twenty six, theories on continental drift were well known on both sides of the Atlantic. In that year, the American Association of Petroleum Geologists held a symposium in New York City to discuss them. Wegener was not there, and overall the symposium was very critical of him. When he wrote the next edition of his book on Continents and Oceans, he tried to address at least some of their criticisms. In nineteen twenty eight, a tornado touched down near Gratz, and that rekindled Wegener's interest in that subject. He and Elsa walked the path that the tornado had followed. They took statements from eyewitnesses, and Wegener agreed to work with meteorologist Johannes Letzmann on a project to try to determine the causes of tornadoes. The following year, Wegner published the final edition of his book on the Origins of Continents and Oceans, this one proposing six possible mechanisms for what might cause continental drift. As that happened, Wegener was planning another trip to Greenland. This time he planned a set up a weather station on the ice sheet where a team would overwinter for two years to systematically gather data about the polar climate. Wagner was almost fifty and he recruited several younger scientists for this expedition, hoping to make sure there would be a new generation of polar researchers. This expedition really struggled from the start. The stock market crash of nineteen twenty nine affected the global economy, and their funding almost fell through When they got to Greenland on April fifteenth of nineteen thirty, the harbor was impassibly iced over, and it stayed that way for two months. The expedition had nearly one hundred tons of supplies to unload, and it was basically impossible for them to start doing so until July. Then they faced unusually bad weather and propeller sleds that did not work as they had hoped, which kept them from being able to haul their equipment very well. They had planned to set up a camp called ice Mitta or mid Ice, part way across the continent, but as winter approached they were woeful leave behind schedule. Ideally, ice Mitta would have been totally set up and fully supplied before the weather became impassable, and the teams at the mid Ice station and on the coast would stay where they were until spring. Instead, by September, the shelter for the mid Ice station and most of their supplies were still sitting at the harbor, but researchers Johannes Georgie and Ernt Sorge were at the station. Wegener and some of his colleagues were absolutely convinced that they if they did not get more supplies out to Aimanta. The two researchers there were not going to survive the winter. Wagener led a relief expedition, which departed by sled on September twenty first. As they progressed across the ice sheet, though nearly everybody with them turned back because it was just too treacherous. Wegener, Rasmus Willemsen, who was innook, and meteorologist Fritz Low were the only ones who got all the way to Ice Mitta, and they arrived there on October thirtieth. By the time they got there, Low was from extreme frostbite and his toes had to be amputated. They were pretty surprised to find the Ismanta team in an ice cave with enough supplies that they hoped they would make it through the winter. They were actually doing some scientific study from this improvised research station in the ice cave. Basically, they seemed to be doing okay with two people, but they definitely did not have the supplies to sustain three more for the whole winter. So Vegener and Willemson decided to head back to the coast, leaving Low behind to recuperate. Those two men left on November first, hoping that the wind that they had been fighting on their way in would help them on the way out, So the team at the coast really didn't have a way of knowing any of this, and the team at ISIMTDA didn't have a way of knowing what happened. After Vegener and Villainson left the ice cave in April of nineteen thirty one, where there had been no word from the two men, people started searching for them. Kurt Wegener came to Greenland to take up his brother's spot at the head of the expedition. Alfred Wegener's body was found on May twelfth, nineteen thirty one, carefully laid out and stitched into sleeping bag covers. The spot was marked with a cairn and a pair of cross Skisveganer's cause of death is unknown, but it could have been heart failure or possibly carbon monoxide poisoning from a camp stove. Whatever the cause, it is clear that Rosmus Willemsen had survived Wegener and had tried to give him as thoughtful a burial as was possible on an ice sheet, But Villamsen was never seen again and his body was never found. The team that found Wegener's body after this search surrounded it with ice blocks and put up a large iron cross. The German government offered to mount an expedition to bring his body back to Germany, but Vegener's wife, Elsa insisted that it be left where it was. Apparently she found the idea that someday, as the ice shifted and split, he might wind up floating at sea in an iceberg. She thought that was a somewhat romantic and suitable and for him. After Wegener's death, some scientists continued to support his ideas of continental drift. British geologist Arthur Holmes worked out a model that explained how the continents moved through convection in the Earth's molten layers, but that was controversial as well. That was a lot closer to how we understand it today. Without its most vocal proponent, the idea of continental drift mostly fell out of favor in most places, although it does seem to have been accepted by the Nazi government of Germany after Vegener's death, and it was sort of used as evidence of German innovation and modernity in Nazi propaganda. The idea that the continents were once connected by now sunken land bridges became a lot more mainstream. Then in the nineteen fifties and sixties, a lot of research started backing up the basic idea of continental drift. A lot of it was connected to magnetism. In molten material, magnetic particles line up with the poles then stay in that position once the material cools and solidifies. In the nineteen fifties, paleomagnetic research suggested that Europe and North America had once been connected based on the way these magnetic materials were oriented. Maps of the ocean floor that were created starting in the nineteen fifties made it clear that the seafloor is not flat. There are mid ocean ridges that we now know align with the edges of tectonic plates. Study of these ridges made it clear that they were both younger and thinner than other parts of the seafloor, and the nineteen sixties researchers discovered what looked like magnetic stripes on either sides of these ridges, corresponding to the shifts in the polarity of the Earth's magnetic field and that magnetic phenomenon that we talked about earlier. Also in the nineteen sixties, the worldwide Standardized Seismograph Network made it possible to spot global patterns in when and where earthquakes occurred, which once again were connected to the movement of tectonic plates. Together, these and other discoveries made it clear that some Wegener's ideas were right. The continents are on tectonic plates, and these plates slowly move, but his ideas for how and why they move weren't really close to the mark. The accepted idea today is that the plates are pushed apart at the mid ocean ridges and in subduction zones. One plate slides under its neighbor, pushing material back down into the Earth's mantle. Most of the time this movement is explained through convection in the molten mantle, but there is still some debate on exactly how this works. Yeah, there's a lot of convection, but then in terms of like, okay, how specifically is the convection making this do That's where there's more debate still Today, there is a lunar crater named for Alfred Wegener, as well as the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research, and various honors and awards bear his name as well. There is a theoretical explanation for ice crystal formation in clouds called the Bergeron Fendysen Wegner process. Wegener's former home is also now Thevegner Museum. If you want to read a lot more about this dispute about continental drift and how the idea grew into plate tectonics, there is a four volume set called The Continental Drift Controversy. It's more than twenty two hundred pages long, so to be clear, it was not part of the research for this episode. I saw a lot of pages. Yeah, it exists. I wanted everyone to know in case you really are so interested in finding out so so, so much more detail. I don't know how many podcast episodes we would need to be able to create to have twenty two hundred pages of a book be part of the research. We'll just do a new podcast. It's nothing but us reading that book aloud. Sure it will get kajillions of listeners. Definitely. Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive, if you heard an email address or a Facebook RL or something similar over the course of the show, that could be obsolete now. Our current email address is History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. You can find us all over social media at Missed Inhistory, and you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the iHeartRadio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Happy Saturday. Alfred Wegener presented his ideas on continental drift before the Geological Association in Frankfort on January sixth, nineteen twelve, or one hundred and twelve years ago today, So our episode on him and the controversy about his research is Today's Saturday Classic. This originally came out December ninth, twenty nineteen. Enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. I really love historical disputes, especially when it's some kind of scientific or technical discovery or advancement, or some kind of medical something that people were arguing over, Like when I've been trying to figure out what to talk about next and nothing on my list is really grabbing me at the moment. Sometimes helped googling, like scientific disputes in history. This is one that I've been hanging on to for a while, and it's Alfred Wegener and the dispute over his theory of continental drift. And I really expected this episode to sound a lot like our previous one on Ignat Semmelweiss and hand washing, except geology, because that's how the story gets told a lot of the time, especially to a general audience. It kind of gets summed up as Alfred Wegener introduced his theory of continental drift and was basically laughed out of the academy, and then after his tragic and untimely death, he was proved to be more or less right and for a discovery that was as important to the field of geology as the discovery of DNA is to biology. But that is really not how this story goes at all. Alfred Wegener had a huge career outside of his ideas around what we understand today as plate tectonics. He did important and respected work that touched on a lot of different disciplines, and while there were definitely people who were very critical and even hostile when it came to what he called continental drift, he did have his supporters, or at least people who were willing to entertain the idea that he could potentially be right. Alfred Wegener was born Alfred Lothar Wegener on November first, eighteen eighty in Berlin, Germany. His parents were Richard and Anna Vigener, and they had five children, Three of whom survived infancy, Alfred was the youngest. His older brother and sister who survived were named Kurt and Tony. The men in the Wagner family typically went into the clergy, and that was also true for Alfred's father. He was a theologian and a classicist, and a pastor and an orphanage director. He also taught at the local gymnasium, but it was against the rules for Kurt and Alfred to attend the same school where he was working because he their father, so they attended a different school and both wound up pursuing an education in science rather than following that family tradition into the church. Kurt studied geophysics and Alfred studied at universities in Heidelberg, Innsbruck, and Berlin before getting a doctorate in astronomy in nineteen oh five. Even before finishing that doctorate, Wegener's interests went outside of what you might think of when we say astronomy. He had studied Max Planck's work on thermochemistry and thermodynamics, and some of the people he studied under for his doctorate were using planetary astronomy as a way to study the Earth rather than focusing on other planetary objects. He was also interested in weather and meteorology, and after finishing his degree, he started working at the German Aeronautical Observatory in Lindenberg. His brother worked there as well, and they used kites and balloons to study the Earth's atmosphere and atmospheric phenomena. At one point during this work, the Vegener brothers spent fifty two hours aloft in a balloon, which set a world record. Alfred Wegener was also part of the team that confirmed the existence of the stratosphere. Wasn't a team he was running, but he was involved in it. Waganer had been interested in Greenland since he was young, and in nineteen oh six he got the opportunity to go there as part of the Danish Denmark expedition, which intended to map Greenland's northeast coast. Wegener was the expedition's physicist and meteorologist, and his research involved more work with kites and balloons to collect atmospheric data. He also got a lot of practical experience in polar exploration. This expedition made its way through extremely inhospitable territory, so Wegener learned things like Arctic survival skills, and how to handle a team of sled dogs. On July tenth of nineteen oh seven, while they were on Cape Bismarck, Wegener and the team observed several water spouts. They took a lot of pictures and documented what they saw, and this experience may have inspired Wegener's interest in tornadoes and water spouts, which will come up again later in his career. Wegener kept journals during this expedition, documenting his experiments and their results, as well as the ordinary work that was associated with it, like setting up the equipment and keeping it maintained and repaired, and he also wrote about his own challenges as a member of the team. He had no experience in polar environments before this, and his knowledge of Danish was limited. Unlike many of the other scientists involved, he was also very early in his career and he hadn't really established a name for himself yet. This expedition achieved its objectives of mapping the northeast coast of Greenland, but it was also tragic. Several of its primary members, including leader Ludwigmilius Erickson, died after being stranded when the sea ice broke up around them. Even so, before it was even over, Wegener was talking about where he might go in the future, even considering an expedition to Antarctica as a future project for himself. In nineteen oh eight, after he returned from Greenland, Wegener moved to Marburg, where he started working at the Physical Institute in Marburg. In nineteen oh nine. He also lectured on meteorology and astronomy at the university there, and Wegener became particularly interested in atmospheric discontinuities, which are sudden, sharp changes in temperature or pressure. For example, there are discontinuity services around the boundaries of weather fronts and at the borders of atmospheric layers. Wegener wrote prolifically over the next three years, publishing more than forty scientific papers and then editing the ones on the subject into a book called Thermodynamics of the Atmosphere. This was a widely respected and referenced text on atmospheric thermodynamics for years, until it was ultimately replaced by a later book on the subject that Wegener also wrote. In nineteen ten, one of Wegener's colleagues brought an atlas into their office that was Richard Andres Algemini handatlas. This was one of the first atlases in Germany that included both the coastlines of South America and Africa and the basymmetry data, or information about the ocean's depths, that had been gathered by the expedition aboard the HMS Challenger in the late nineteenth century. So Wegener noticed something in this combination of data that intrigued him. He noticed that the eastern coast of South America looked like it would fit exactly against the western coast of Africa. And this wasn't just at the coastline at sea level. It was also part of the underwater topography off of the visible coast. He wrote a letter to Elsa Coppin, daughter of climatologist Vladimir Coppin. Vladimir Coppin had advised Wegener in advance of the Denmark expedition, and Alfred and Oas had started corresponding. Veganer wrote, quote, doesn't the east coast of South America fit exactly against the west coast of Africa as if they had once been joined? This is an idea I'll have to pursue. He didn't pursue it right away, though it seems to have kind of slipped his mind until about a year later when he read a newly published paper on paleogeography that documented fossils that had been found on both sides of the Atlantic. That combined with Wegener's earlier study of that atlas to put him on the path of formulating a theory of continental drift. And we will get to that after a sponsor break. Alfred Wegener was not at all the first person to notice that the eastern coast of South America and the western coast of Africa looked like they could fit together like puzzle pieces. I mean, this is an observation that children make the first time they experience a globe or an atlis that shows all of that. And people had been spotting that similarity starting as soon as there were maps showing both of those coasts. In fifteen ninety six, Dutch map maker Abraham Ortellius wrote that the Americas looked like they had been quote torn away from Europe and Africa by earthquakes and floods. Francis Bacon commented on it in his Nova Organum or True Suggestions for the Interpretation of Nature in sixteen twenty in a passage on similarities found in the natural world. He wrote, quote similar instances are not to be neglected in the greater portions of the world's confirmation, such as Africa and the Peruvian continent, which reaches to the Straits of Magellan, both of which possess a similar isthmus and similar capes, a circumstance not to be attributed to mere accident. By the nineteenth century, naturalists that also started to document animals, plants, and physical features that seemed to exist on both sides of oceans in a way that seemed impossible or at least really improvable, given that the ocean was there to separate them. There were rock formations on one side of the ocean that seemed to pick up again on the other side. Mesosauris fossils were found in both Brazil and South Africa, and there are freshwater trilobite fossils from the genus Para doxides that were found in both North America and Europe. Naturalists found living animals too, like lemurs which live in Southeast Africa, the island of Madagascar, and Southeast Asia. Even though there's a lot of water separating all of those. There were also coal beds on both sides of the Atlantic and seemed to be a part of the same system. And physical evidence of glaciers that had once existed in parts of the world now have tropical climates, and fossils of tropical plants and areas that are now polar. The list went on and on and on. So people started trying to come up with all kinds of possible explanations for how all of this stuff came to be. So for the animal fossils and the living animals, maybe they swam really was one, but kind of briefly that was easy to discount. It seemed incredibly unlikely that the animals in question could have swum that far, or maybe, I don't know, clung to a floating log all the way across the ocean. Maybe they swam. Explanation also didn't account for things like rock formations and glaciers that seemed to have existed in what seemed like the wrong place. Another popular idea was that at one time there had been land bridges connecting the continents, but that those had ultimately sunk into the ocean. This tied into another prevalent idea that the Earth had once been molten and was contracting as it cooled and solidified. It was a little like the surface of a plum as it dries into a prune, which could explain the existence of both oceans and mountains. That land bridge idea still had some problems, though, it didn't explain the rock formations that seemed to stop at one coast and then pick up again on the other side of the ocean, unless maybe those formations had been part of these land bridges that were now underwater. But then there also wasn't a clear answer to what could have caused the land bridges to sink, if they had ever existed. In eighteen fifty eight, Antonio Snyder Pellegrini argued that maybe Africa and South America had been one continent at some point point in the past. He suggested that the continents had been forced apart in the flood that is described in the biblical Book of Genesis. Then a few decades later, when radioactivity was discovered in eighteen ninety six, that raised more questions about this general idea that the earth was molten and was just contracting as it cooled. How could that be happening if there were radioactive materials within the Earth that were giving off heat. On December twenty ninth, nineteen oh eight, American geologist Frank B. Taylor gave a presentation to the Geological Society of America in which he suggested that the continents were moving and had been pulled apart by lunar gravity. He thought that the collisions of the continents had pushed mountains into being, and that the continence movement had also left deep tears in the oceans. He published a paper in nineteen ten, and other papers followed. It is definitely possible that Wegener read Taylor's nineteen ten paper or one of the ones that followed, and for a while the theory of continental drift was actually called the Tailor Veganer hypothesis. In nineteen thirty two, though Taylor said that his name should be dropped off from the descriptor because other than the basic idea that the continents were moving, his ideas were really different from Veginer's. Here's what Veganer thought was going on. He thought that the planet was made from concentric layers of material, which were denser the further down you go, and the outermost layer, with the continents on it was not contiguous. Oceans filled in any gaps. The continent layer was made of seal material that's largely silicon and aluminum, and the ocean floors were sema that's silicon and magnesium. Seal was less dense than sema, so the seal continents could float along the sema ocean floor, kind of like icebergs float on the ocean. Veginer thought that at some point, about two hundred million years ago, all the continents had been connected into one land mass that he called Pangaea, and then something had broken them apart and allowed them to mindgrate around the Earth. He thought this motion explained how mountains formed. It wasn't that the Earth was cooling and shrinking like a prune, or that mountains were being pushed up by the force of colliding continents. He thought they were formed by the resistance that the continents experienced as they were sort of pllowing through the ocean floor beneath them, sort of like the way a tablecloth wrinkles if you try to push it across the table. Veginer also thought that islands were pieces that had broken off the continents as they were moving. Veganer was not entirely sure what was providing the energy needed for the continents to move. He proposed several possibilities, and the one that he focused on the most was that it was some kind of energy related to irregularities in the planet's rotation on its axis. Wagner detailed all this in two papers published in nineteen eleven and nineteen twelve, both titled The Origin of Continents. He cited evidence from several different fields, including geology, paleontology, geophysics, and geotesy, and on January sixth of nineteen twelve he spoke about these ideas before the Geological Association in Frankfurt, and then he presented on it at the Society for the Advancement of Natural Science in Marburg, Germany a few days after that. This was just dramatically different from how most scientists understood the world at the time, and to be clear, it's really not how we understand it today either. But it also wasn't the only hypothesis out there. Other geologists had also put forth various ideas about how the Earth's continents might have been joined together at some point in the distant past. Basically, it was clear that the whole model of the Earth as a molten object that was cooling and contracting just wasn't correct, So a lot of scientists were trying to figure out what really was happening. Wegener had some supporters, or at least people who thought he might be onto something. These were especially people who had personally seen or already knew about some of the evidence that he had cited, But he also had plenty of detractors. Some of this was rooted in the details of his work. For example, he said that Greenland was moving at about one hundred and twenty feet or thirty six meters a year. That was an error, and it was easily disproved. It also didn't seem like slight irregularities in the Earth's rotation could have provided nearly enough energy to move entire continents, especially if those continents were plowing their way through a less dense layer of the planet underneath them. Some of the people who disagreed with Wegener were particularly scathing about it. For example, doctor Rollin T. Chamberlain of the University of Chicago said, quote Veganer's hypothesis in general is of the footloose type, in that it takes considerable liberty with our globe and is less bound by restrictions or tied down by awkward, ugly facts than most of its rival theories. So this wasn't really a case of one man, Alfred Wegener against the whole of science. Enough people thought he was at least partially correct that they became known as the mobilists, while people who disagreed were called the anti mobilist or the fixists. This was not the end of Wegener's work on his continental drift theory, but he did keep working on lots of other stuff during his career, and we're going to talk a little bit more about that after we pause for a sponsor break. Alfred Wegener took another expedition to Greenland starting in nineteen twelve. This was another treacherous expedition meant to cross and survey the Greenland ice sheet from east to west, including spending the entire winter out there on the ice sheet. At one point, a glacier that the team was on unexpectedly calved, and Veganer wrote that they quote escaped death only by a miracle. Veginer and Elsa Coppin that we mentioned earlier had gotten engaged before that expedition, and they married after he returned in nineteen thirteen. They would eventually have three daughters together. Ess was a translator, translating scientific works, including some by her husband. She also published a biography of Alfred, including parts of his notes and journals after his death. Wegener's work as a scientist and a researcher was interrupted by World War One. He served in the German Army, first as a lieutenant and then as a captain. He was wounded twice, once on August twenty third, nineteen fourteen, in Belgium, and then once again in France on October fourth of that same year. That second injury was a lot worse. He was shot in the neck and had to go home to recover. He used that recovery time to write his book, The Origin of Continents and Oceans, which expanded on his earlier ideas around continental drift. Once Wegener was sufficiently recovered, he returned to the army, this time serving with the Field Weather Service as a meteorologist. This was not a particularly taxing assignment. He was stationed on the Western Front, which was a dangerous place to be, but his daily duties mostly involved making some routine weather observations, so he spent this time on study and research, writing a paper called on the formation of Hoarfrost on horse corpses, as well as a book called Tornadoes and Waterspouts in Europe. This book pulled together information on two hundred and fifty eight reported tornadoes that had struck in Europe between fourteen fifty six and nineteen thirteen. Because he could only get to one library to do his research because he was literally stationed at the Western Front during a war, most of the tornadoes in question were in Western Europe, reasonably near where he was stationed. This was the first Pan European book on tornado climatology, and it was really thorough. His intent was not to speculate on the causes of tornadoes and waterspouts, which was not settled at that point. It was instead to pull together a wealth of data on how large the tornadoes were and when and where they struck and how they moved, along with other details like what they smelled and sounded like and any electrical phenomena associated with them. On April third of nineteen sixteen, while Vegener was at home in Marburg for Easter, a meteorite struck outside the nearby town of Treesa. Two professors from the University of Marbor got in touch with Wegener about trying to figure out where this meteorite had fallen. So Wegener cross referenced newspaper accounts and eyewitness statements try to calculate its trajectory, eventually requesting some additional leave from the army to try to finish up this work. When the meteorite's remains were found on March fifth of nineteen seventeen, they were very close to the spot that he had predicted. Later in World War One, Wegener was transferred to the Eastern Front and then back to the Western Front. He kept working on his book on tornadoes, which came out in nineteen seventeen. Once the war was over, Weginar had trouble finding work at a university, and this seems to have been at least as much about economic conditions as it was about his controversial theories about how the earth worked. He and Elsa eventually moved in with her father, and Alfred went to work at the German Marine Weather Observatory, in a position that his father in law had previously held. Begener held his position for five years, and he did have teaching privileges at the university of Hamburg. In nineteen twenty one, Wegner published research on the causes of lunar craters. At the time, there were four primary hypotheses about what had caused the craters on the lunar surface. That they were the remnants of some kind of bubbles that had collapsed, That they had been caused by tidal forces, that they were volcanoes, or that they were the aftermath of meteorite impacts. Wegener used cement powder to simulate both the lunar surface and the meteorites, basically throwing little bits of cement powder at a layer of cement powder with a teaspoon. Then he would carefully missed the surface of the simulated moon to set the powder. Once that was done, he would measure and document the craters that had been formed. In the pamphlet that he published on this subject, Wegener outlined various arguments against the other three hypotheses before detailing how these simulations supported the idea that meteorite impacts had caused the creators on the moon. I love this so much, honestly so do I. It's Alfred Wegener's crafty time that is very scientifically grounded. I love it it's simultaneously very charming and really cool. It's ingenius. In nineteen twenty two, Wegener published another edition of his book on the Origins of Continents, and this one was translated into several languages. It was still a controversial work, but it was not unanimously dismissed. Two years later, in nineteen twenty four, Vegener and his father in law published a book called Climates of the Geological Past. That same year, Begener became a professor at the University of Grutz, where he was the chair of the departments of Meteorology and Geophysics. He also published another expanded edition of his earlier work on continental drift, this one also called The Origin of Continents and Oceans. By nineteen twenty six, theories on continental drift were well known on both sides of the Atlantic. In that year, the American Association of Petroleum Geologists held a symposium in New York City to discuss them. Wegener was not there, and overall the symposium was very critical of him. When he wrote the next edition of his book on Continents and Oceans, he tried to address at least some of their criticisms. In nineteen twenty eight, a tornado touched down near Gratz, and that rekindled Wegener's interest in that subject. He and Elsa walked the path that the tornado had followed. They took statements from eyewitnesses, and Wegener agreed to work with meteorologist Johannes Letzmann on a project to try to determine the causes of tornadoes. The following year, Wegner published the final edition of his book on the Origins of Continents and Oceans, this one proposing six possible mechanisms for what might cause continental drift. As that happened, Wegener was planning another trip to Greenland. This time he planned a set up a weather station on the ice sheet where a team would overwinter for two years to systematically gather data about the polar climate. Wagner was almost fifty and he recruited several younger scientists for this expedition, hoping to make sure there would be a new generation of polar researchers. This expedition really struggled from the start. The stock market crash of nineteen twenty nine affected the global economy, and their funding almost fell through When they got to Greenland on April fifteenth of nineteen thirty, the harbor was impassibly iced over, and it stayed that way for two months. The expedition had nearly one hundred tons of supplies to unload, and it was basically impossible for them to start doing so until July. Then they faced unusually bad weather and propeller sleds that did not work as they had hoped, which kept them from being able to haul their equipment very well. They had planned to set up a camp called ice Mitta or mid Ice, part way across the continent, but as winter approached they were woeful leave behind schedule. Ideally, ice Mitta would have been totally set up and fully supplied before the weather became impassable, and the teams at the mid Ice station and on the coast would stay where they were until spring. Instead, by September, the shelter for the mid Ice station and most of their supplies were still sitting at the harbor, but researchers Johannes Georgie and Ernt Sorge were at the station. Wegener and some of his colleagues were absolutely convinced that they if they did not get more supplies out to Aimanta. The two researchers there were not going to survive the winter. Wagener led a relief expedition, which departed by sled on September twenty first. As they progressed across the ice sheet, though nearly everybody with them turned back because it was just too treacherous. Wegener, Rasmus Willemsen, who was innook, and meteorologist Fritz Low were the only ones who got all the way to Ice Mitta, and they arrived there on October thirtieth. By the time they got there, Low was from extreme frostbite and his toes had to be amputated. They were pretty surprised to find the Ismanta team in an ice cave with enough supplies that they hoped they would make it through the winter. They were actually doing some scientific study from this improvised research station in the ice cave. Basically, they seemed to be doing okay with two people, but they definitely did not have the supplies to sustain three more for the whole winter. So Vegener and Willemson decided to head back to the coast, leaving Low behind to recuperate. Those two men left on November first, hoping that the wind that they had been fighting on their way in would help them on the way out, So the team at the coast really didn't have a way of knowing any of this, and the team at ISIMTDA didn't have a way of knowing what happened. After Vegener and Villainson left the ice cave in April of nineteen thirty one, where there had been no word from the two men, people started searching for them. Kurt Wegener came to Greenland to take up his brother's spot at the head of the expedition. Alfred Wegener's body was found on May twelfth, nineteen thirty one, carefully laid out and stitched into sleeping bag covers. The spot was marked with a cairn and a pair of cross Skisveganer's cause of death is unknown, but it could have been heart failure or possibly carbon monoxide poisoning from a camp stove. Whatever the cause, it is clear that Rosmus Willemsen had survived Wegener and had tried to give him as thoughtful a burial as was possible on an ice sheet, But Villamsen was never seen again and his body was never found. The team that found Wegener's body after this search surrounded it with ice blocks and put up a large iron cross. The German government offered to mount an expedition to bring his body back to Germany, but Vegener's wife, Elsa insisted that it be left where it was. Apparently she found the idea that someday, as the ice shifted and split, he might wind up floating at sea in an iceberg. She thought that was a somewhat romantic and suitable and for him. After Wegener's death, some scientists continued to support his ideas of continental drift. British geologist Arthur Holmes worked out a model that explained how the continents moved through convection in the Earth's molten layers, but that was controversial as well. That was a lot closer to how we understand it today. Without its most vocal proponent, the idea of continental drift mostly fell out of favor in most places, although it does seem to have been accepted by the Nazi government of Germany after Vegener's death, and it was sort of used as evidence of German innovation and modernity in Nazi propaganda. The idea that the continents were once connected by now sunken land bridges became a lot more mainstream. Then in the nineteen fifties and sixties, a lot of research started backing up the basic idea of continental drift. A lot of it was connected to magnetism. In molten material, magnetic particles line up with the poles then stay in that position once the material cools and solidifies. In the nineteen fifties, paleomagnetic research suggested that Europe and North America had once been connected based on the way these magnetic materials were oriented. Maps of the ocean floor that were created starting in the nineteen fifties made it clear that the seafloor is not flat. There are mid ocean ridges that we now know align with the edges of tectonic plates. Study of these ridges made it clear that they were both younger and thinner than other parts of the seafloor, and the nineteen sixties researchers discovered what looked like magnetic stripes on either sides of these ridges, corresponding to the shifts in the polarity of the Earth's magnetic field and that magnetic phenomenon that we talked about earlier. Also in the nineteen sixties, the worldwide Standardized Seismograph Network made it possible to spot global patterns in when and where earthquakes occurred, which once again were connected to the movement of tectonic plates. Together, these and other discoveries made it clear that some Wegener's ideas were right. The continents are on tectonic plates, and these plates slowly move, but his ideas for how and why they move weren't really close to the mark. The accepted idea today is that the plates are pushed apart at the mid ocean ridges and in subduction zones. One plate slides under its neighbor, pushing material back down into the Earth's mantle. Most of the time this movement is explained through convection in the molten mantle, but there is still some debate on exactly how this works. Yeah, there's a lot of convection, but then in terms of like, okay, how specifically is the convection making this do That's where there's more debate still Today, there is a lunar crater named for Alfred Wegener, as well as the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research, and various honors and awards bear his name as well. There is a theoretical explanation for ice crystal formation in clouds called the Bergeron Fendysen Wegner process. Wegener's former home is also now Thevegner Museum. If you want to read a lot more about this dispute about continental drift and how the idea grew into plate tectonics, there is a four volume set called The Continental Drift Controversy. It's more than twenty two hundred pages long, so to be clear, it was not part of the research for this episode. I saw a lot of pages. Yeah, it exists. I wanted everyone to know in case you really are so interested in finding out so so, so much more detail. I don't know how many podcast episodes we would need to be able to create to have twenty two hundred pages of a book be part of the research. We'll just do a new podcast. It's nothing but us reading that book aloud. Sure it will get kajillions of listeners. Definitely. Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive, if you heard an email address or a Facebook RL or something similar over the course of the show, that could be obsolete now. Our current email address is History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. You can find us all over social media at Missed Inhistory, and you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the iHeartRadio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.