The pioneering arctic scientist, Alfred Wegener, unfortunately, did not survive to witness the success of his idea. However, Wegener might also be considered the Copernicus of earth sciences in hindsight, given that he transformed our understanding of the planet and put up with much criticism and hostility as a result. He is now widely regarded as the “father of plate tectonics,” or the theory that first proposed the existence of such features. It took almost half a century for further surveys and research to vindicate Wegener and validate his idea. The thought that the solid crust of the Earth might shift about was seen as ridiculous since it went against all that had been accepted as true and given up until that point.Īlfred Wegener doubted the conventional wisdom. The bulk of Wegener’s contemporaries disregarded his hypothesis as the ramblings of an “incompetent career switcher” in the earth sciences, and most did not even bother to read his papers. The bulk of the scientific community, including the president of the esteemed American Philosophical Society, first dismissed Wegener’s idea as “complete nonsense.” Like Darwin, Wegener challenged the prevailing worldview of his day and was met with hostility, derision, and even violence for his efforts. For, he proposed the idea that the location of the continents on the Earth’s crust might shift during the course of the planet’s history, contradicting the idea that the continents are fixed in place. On that day, Alfred Wegener, then 31 years old, presented a theory challenging long-held beliefs about the origins of the Earth’s seas and continents. On January 6, 1912, during the Geological Association’s annual conference in Frankfurt, Germany, one man stood alone against the establishment. The revolutions in the theory of tectonics
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