Wegener Presents Continental Drift: Everyone Laughs, He's Right

The continents were once one landmass. Alfred Wegener said so at a geological conference in Frankfurt on January 6, 1912, and most of the scientists in the room thought he was wrong. He called it continental drift. His evidence: the coastlines of South America and Africa fit together like puzzle pieces. Identical fossils appeared on both sides of the Atlantic. Mountain ranges in Europe lined up with mountain ranges in North America. His colleagues dismissed him. Wegener was a meteorologist, not a geologist. His mechanism — how exactly the continents moved — was unconvincing. He died in Greenland in 1930, still arguing for his theory. It took another 40 years. In the 1960s, oceanographers discovered mid-ocean ridges and seafloor spreading. Suddenly Wegener's puzzle pieces had a mechanism. His theory became plate tectonics — the foundational framework of modern geology. He never got a Nobel Prize. He didn't live to see vindication.