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MOST IMPORTANT SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERIES
The concept of drifting continents. History and essence of scientific discovery
Directory / The most important scientific discoveries After the discovery of America by Columbus, the images of the American coast began to be specified on geographical maps. “If you take a closer look at a globe or any map of the world, you can see one feature of the outlines of many coastlines,” writes Boris Silkin. Greenland looks like it has just escaped from the "embrace" of North America on one side and Northern Europe on the other... The long arm of the Antarctic Peninsula in the Western Hemisphere merges with the extreme south of South America, and so on : many ledges on one side of the sea correspond to depressions in the outlines of the land on the other side. These "geographical oddities" were noted by people in those days when they were just learning how to make maps. The famous English philosopher Francis Bacon (1561–1626), the French thinker Francois Place and many others thought about this. As early as 1596, the scientific treatise of the Flemish cartographer Abraham Ortelius (1527-1598) "Geographic Treasury" was published in Amsterdam. Ortelius made two remarkable "breakthroughs" in the knowledge of the world, anticipating the current dominant theory of continental drift by centuries. He not only noted the "compatibility" of the coastlines of the Old and New Worlds (including Europe), but also tried to realistically imagine how the continents were moving apart. Antonio Snyder, in the mid-nineteenth century, became aware of the complete similarity of Paleozoic Carboniferous plant fossils found in Europe and North America. Snider began to look for the cause. He decided that the fossil trees grew in one large forest, which had once been divided into parts. One half ended up in Europe and the other half in America! Snider brings the continents together on the map so that the shores are connected, and he gets a single continent. In 1858, his work "The Universe and Its Secrets Revealed" was published in Paris. But his idea seemed implausible to his contemporaries, and they forgot about it. The same fate befell the hypotheses of several other European and American scientists. They all assumed that the continents of our day are just fragments of larger "supercontinents" of the distant past, thousands of kilometers apart from each other. Finally, in 1910-1912, the German researcher Wegener not only put forward this hypothesis again, but also supported it with a variety of geological and geophysical data. Alfred Lothar Wegener (1880–1930) was born into the family of a Berlin priest. At first, Alfred chose the profession of an astronomer. He was educated at Heidelberg, Innsbruck and Berlin Universities. While still a student, he wrote a work on the motion of the planets. It was highly appreciated by experts. “But from his student years, he dreamed of doing research on the island of Greenland and the science of weather - meteorology, which at that time was practically taking its first steps,” notes B. Silkin. “And not only dreamed, but also prepared for this. Wegener devoted all his free time to long-distance ski trips, ice skating, as well as the manufacture and launch of ... balloons and kites, believing that these "toys" would be the first means of delivering measuring instruments to relatively high layers of the atmosphere, where weather. Together with his brother Kurt in 1906, he set a record for the duration of a continuous stay in the air in a balloon - 52 hours. "Air" and sporting achievements of Alfred Wegener did not go unnoticed, and soon he was included as a meteorologist in the Danish polar expedition, heading to Greenland, which beckoned him. Then - teaching meteorology at the University of Marburg. There he wrote an interesting paper on how thermal energy behaves in the atmosphere. And in 1912 - a new expedition to Greenland. The collected data on meteorology and glaciology (the science of ice and snow) filled many volumes." The First World War interrupted scientific work. Wegener becomes a junior officer in the German army. After the end of the war, he became director of the Department of Meteorological Research at the Naval Observatory in Hamburg. In 1924, the scientist moved to Austria, where he received the chair of meteorology and geophysics at the University of Graz. In 1929, Wegener's third expedition to Greenland began. There he died in 1930. In obituaries dedicated to the scientist, his merits in the field of atmospheric physics were noted. He was talked about as a major polar explorer, an excellent organizer of science and a teacher. But not a word was said about Wegener's discovery, which glorified him. It is difficult to say how the German scientist came to believe that the continents are capable of "driving around" on the surface of the Earth. It is very likely that, like his predecessors, the characteristic outlines of the continents of our planet prompted this idea. Naturally, Wegener had to overcome enormous difficulties, since he did not have most of the facts and knowledge that are known at the present time. Nevertheless, he managed to lay a solid foundation for modern ideas about the structure and development of the Earth, including the foundations of the theory of continental drift, the movement of the poles, and the climate changes that are subject to these movements. Today, Wegener's hypothesis is well known as the floating ("drifting") continent hypothesis. A single supercontinent of the Paleozoic era, later split and disintegrated, Wegener called "Pangea", which means "single earth". In January 1912, Wegener presented his hypothesis at a meeting of the German Geological Association in Frankfurt am Main. The hypothesis refuted the ideas existing at that time. It has become the subject of heated debate in the scientific world. Opponents of the scientist believed that the continents move only in a vertical direction. Thus, when the earth's crust rises, land is formed, while lowering - seas and oceans. Wegener, on the other hand, spoke with conviction about the horizontal movement of the continents - they are "moving apart", "drifting". As a result, oceans are formed. Alas, Wegener's hypothesis was rejected by the majority. For several decades, geologists and geophysicists forgot about the hypothesis. In fairness, it must be said that in fact there were weaknesses in it, which experts were not slow to point out. One of the weaknesses of Wegener's hypothesis is the difficulty in explaining the "mechanism" that sets the continents in motion. In the thirties and forties such an explanation was given by the Scottish geologist Arthur Holmes (1890–1965). He suggested that the force driving the continents could be the flows of matter that exist in the mantle and set in motion by the temperature difference. In this case, warm streams rise up, and cold streams fall down. He likened the moving basalt layer to an "endless conveyor belt" that moves the continents. It took another half a century for, by the end of the sixties of the twentieth century, ideas about major movements of the earth's crust turned from a hypothesis into an expanded theory, into a doctrine of plate tectonics. Today, Wegener's hypothesis is universally recognized and is developing in accordance with the level of modern science. Author: Samin D.K.
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