Continental drift

Last question in this category.

Decades before plate tectonics became accepted science, this German scientist proposed continental drift.

just kidding

uh who is who is

And thanks again, John, for being on our episode.

Of course, come and find me on Instagram.

If you want red Panda content, or now it's going to be continental drift content.

What's his name? Alfred Wegener? Like, yeah.

Alfred Wiesner was a German meteorologist and a specialist in polar air masses.

In 1915, he published a revolutionary text proposing continental drift.

Wegener looked at a map and saw the same glaring topographical coincidence every child sees.

The eastern coastline of South America and the western coastline of Africa fit together like interlocking puzzle pieces.

He ultimately died in 1930 at the age of 50 during an expedition on the Greenland ice sheet, his body buried under the snow, his theory widely considered a fringe obsession.

But the very ice that buried Wigener sits on a landmass that is actively drifting.

And the ultimate vindication of continental drift, the proof that saved Wigener's legacy and solved Krakatoa's origins, came from an entirely new field, paleomagnetism.

And this is where the narrative connects directly to the author of our source text, Simon Winchester.

Same mountains.

Continental Drift occurred, shit happened.

These were the same mountains.

Good rule of thumb.

agree.

And I've talked about that, that anywhere we live here in the United States, somebody has been there before, even before the indigenous people like you, Panagia, Continental Drift, all that.

I think it was all one landmass and there have been people all over the place.

Well, they're finding tools in granite that are 250 million years old.

So how do we know it's actually happening? Way back in the 1910s, German geologist Alfred Wegener looked at a map of the world and noticed that the continents looked like they fit together, almost like puzzle pieces.

And he built a theory to explain what he was seeing, continental drift.

He believed that the continents were moving slowly around the earth, together and apart, drifting through the crust like icebergs in the ocean.

He's even credited with coming up with the name Pangea, meaning all of the Earth.