Quotes About Wegener

My father was an entomologist who believed in continental drift. In the early '50s, that was regarded as nonsense. It was in the mid-'50s that it came back. Someone had thought of it 30 or 40 years earlier named Alfred Wegener, and he never got to see it come back.

To be sure, Wegener made mistakes. He asserted that Greenland is drifting west at about 1.6 kilometres a year, a clear nonsense. (Its more like a centimetre.)

That we can now think of no mechanism for astrology is relevant but unconvincing. No mechanism was known, for example, for continental drift when it was proposed by Wegener. Nevertheless, we see that Wegener was right, and those who objected on the grounds of unavailable mechanism were wrong.

About 250 million years ago, most of the continental plates were joined into a supercontinent, which Wegener had christened "Pangaea." It was surrounded by a single, large sea, known as Panthalassa.