Alfred Wegener: The Father of 20th Century Geoscience?

Since the industrial revolution of the 1900’s, the scientific world has progressed exponentially in terms of discovery and innovative theory. We have seen a cornucopia of impressive revelations which have aided our understanding of the formation of some of the most beautiful landforms our world has to offer, discovered magnetic fluctuations at our poles and in the upper-atmosphere, and painted a true picture of the inner-workings of our planet. Yet for many, the work of Alfred Wegener, an astronomer and meteorologist by trade, in devising the ‘draft’ Theory of Continental Drift was, and remains, the biggest advancement in geosciences to date.

   For me, it is not hard to see why many people would agree with the above statement, clearly, with ‘geoscience’ as an area explicitly referring to the study of the sciences of the earth, there can be no greater contribution to this field than actually devising why the world is as it is today. The implications of this hypothesis, that the Earth is composed of several large plates, as well as multiple other, smaller plates, gave a base for other gifted scientists, further down the timeline, to devise theories for the formation of landforms which were formerly a mystery. Without this first concept of continental drift, perhaps even today we would be mystified by the mid-ocean ridge, the birth of Surtsey in the 60’s would be ‘an act of God’, and the occurrence of earthquakes would continue to be a freakish unpredictability.

   However, we must remember that although Wegener fathered the initial key concept, he did not generate the full picture. In Wegener’s ‘Origins of Continents and Oceans’, he likened the continents to ice-breakers, ploughing through and splitting the oceanic plates apart on their path, and suggesting that the continents were driven by a ‘magnetic tide’ within the Earth. Since this was first laid out, the concept of ‘inner Earth tides’ has been irrefutably disproven, as have his ideas of the nature of the plates. Regardless, his early work laid out the foundations for the evolution of the theory over time, where the plates and upper mantle float and move via convection currents in the asthenosphere, providing a paradigm for geoscientific development in the years to follow.

   In the end, I suppose it is just important that we remember that although Wegener had somethings wrong, his initial ideas sowed the seeds for incredible geoscientific advancement in the years to come. Like Galileo, who laid out his first designs for the helicopter, he neither had everything right nor designed the final model, they both provided a platform from which future generations could take their ideas and bring them to life.