Alfred Wegener and the Story of Plate Tectonics
Read the story “Continents: A Jigsaw Puzzle with No Mechanism.” This can be found on our D2L site and also at http://www.storybehindthescience.org/pdf/jigsaw.pdf
- What were the early explanations for the similarities in continents’ borders and shapes?
Abraham Ortelius (1596) – Father Francis Placet (1666) – Friedrich Humboldt (1801) – Antonio Snider-Pellegrini (1858) – - Note how several of these explanations use catastrophes appearing in religious texts to explain natural events. How does this illustrate the influence of the wider culture and prevailing ideas on people investigating the natural world?
- What is Uniformitarianism?
- The scientists who were trying to explain the continent shapes, just like scientists today, are devoting much time, thought and effort to developing and substantiating ideas that will account for the available evidence. However, whenever a new idea is proposed, it almost always requires further work and modification. Note that each idea proposed thus far regarding the continents has some explanatory power, but also has significant problems. How does the time required to develop and substantiate science ideas as illustrated in this story compare to what science textbooks convey about the time required to develop and substantiate science ideas?
- What was the “contractionist” view of continent shape and formation?
- What was the “mobilist” view of continent shape and formation?
- Describe the idea of “continental displacement” that Alfred Wegener proposed in 1912.
- What geological phenomena did the idea of “continental displacement” provide a plausible explanation?
- Was Wegener’s idea of “continental displacement” widely accepted at first?
- Why was Wegener’s idea of “continental displacement” not widely accepted at first? What did it lack?
- What were some other reasons why Wegener’s theory was not accepted at first?
- What does this story of “continental displacement” tell us about how scientific ideas develop over time?