Books: The Rejection of Continental Drift

Sometimes the experts are wrong.

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Alfred Wegener’s theory of continental drift is an example of an idea being roundly rejected by scientific consensus despite being basically correct. Wegener proposed the theory in 1912, but it wasn’t until the 1960s that it gained acceptance in the form of modern plate tectonics, and even then, it took time for the change to percolate down into the textbooks of kids in Podunk. My own father never learned in school that the continents move.

In The Rejection of Continental Drift: Theory and Method in American Earth Science, author Naomi Oreskes tells the story of the theory’s rejection and eventual acceptance. She starts the story with the problem of mountains.

Why Do Mountains Exist?

One major problem of 19th century geology was mountain building. How exactly did these massive rocky things come to be? There were two leading theories: The contraction theory of Austrian geologist Eduard Suess, and the geosyncline theory of American geologist James Dana.

The Seuss theory was the latest in a line of theories based on the idea that the earth was going through a long process of cooling and contracting. Suess argued that contraction caused the surface of the earth to wrinkle, like the skin of a drying apple. As the earth contracted and wrinkled, dry land would collapse down to become new ocean basin, and former ocean basin might become dry land. And the wrinkling, crinkling forces of this contraction formed mountains.

The Dana theory also made use of the idea that earth was once much hotter, a mass of molten rock. The continents, oceans, and mountains were all formed early on in cooling process, as the molten solidified. The continents cooled first, the ocean basins later, and the differential cooling and contracting produced a pressure that caused the edges of the continents to buckle and fold. These folds made mountains.

The two theories were similar in that both invoke a cooling and contracting of the earth, and both might nowadays get lumped together as contraction or cooling theories. But at the time they were seen as part of two very different theoretical camps. One camp was called uniformitarianism, the other catastrophism.

Uniformitarianism vs. Catastrophism

Scottish geologist Charles Lyell’s doctrine of uniformitarianism was the idea that the forces that shaped the earth in the distant past are the same as those we can see shaping it today. Thus geologists should limit themselves to explaining the earth with readily observable forces, like erosion by wind and rain.