Continental Drift Is Unlikely to Have Toaken Place. Discuss.
Continental drift is a theory stating that the Earth's continents have been joined together and have moved away from each other at different times in the Earth's history. The theory was first proposed by Alfred Wegener in 1912. Whilst his general idea of continental movement eventually became widely accepted, his explanation for the mechanism of the movement has been supplanted by the theory of plant tectonics. However there was a problem in accepting this idea originally because Wegener had no convincing mechanism or solid evidence for how the continents might move.
Wegener had originally thought that the continents were through the surface of the earth's crust, like icebreakers plowing through ice sheets, and that centrifugal and tidal force were responsible for moving the continents. Opponents of the idea of continental drift noted that plowing through oceanic crust would distort continents beyond recognition, and that centrifugal and tidal forces were far too weak to move continents ,one scientist calculated that a tidal force strong enough to move continents would cause the Earth to stop rotating in less than one year. Sir Harold Jeffreys was a strong opponent of continental drift. For him, continental drift was "out of the question" because no force even remotely strong enough to move the continents across the Earth's surface was evident, this made a lot of people side with him as he was a highly recognized man with many titles, including winning a prize in 1937 of the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society . Another problem was that flaws in Wegener's original data caused him to make some incorrect and outlandish predictions: he suggested that North America and Europe were moving apart at over 250 cm per year (about 10 times the fastest rates seen today, and about a hundred times faster than the measured rate for North America and Europe). There were scientists who supported Wegener: the South African geologist Alexander Du Toit supported it as an
Wegener had originally thought that the continents were through the surface of the earth's crust, like icebreakers plowing through ice sheets, and that centrifugal and tidal force were responsible for moving the continents. Opponents of the idea of continental drift noted that plowing through oceanic crust would distort continents beyond recognition, and that centrifugal and tidal forces were far too weak to move continents ,one scientist calculated that a tidal force strong enough to move continents would cause the Earth to stop rotating in less than one year. Sir Harold Jeffreys was a strong opponent of continental drift. For him, continental drift was "out of the question" because no force even remotely strong enough to move the continents across the Earth's surface was evident, this made a lot of people side with him as he was a highly recognized man with many titles, including winning a prize in 1937 of the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society . Another problem was that flaws in Wegener's original data caused him to make some incorrect and outlandish predictions: he suggested that North America and Europe were moving apart at over 250 cm per year (about 10 times the fastest rates seen today, and about a hundred times faster than the measured rate for North America and Europe). There were scientists who supported Wegener: the South African geologist Alexander Du Toit supported it as an