The best characterization of the hypothesis which I have heard was the remark made at the 1922 meeting of the Geological Society of America at Ann Arbor. It was this: “If we are to believe Wegener’s hypothesis we must forget everything which has been learned in the last seventy years and start over again.”
Through the nineteen-thirties, and particularly after the Second World War, paleomagnetic data accrued, and, as it presented its story of kaleidoscopic environments changing through time in any given place, academic geologists sketched on globes and maps their curves of apparent polar wander. Here is zakelijke energie where the poles were at the end of the Silurian; this is where they went from there. Rocks of identical age, sampled in various parts of the world, indicated as much in their imprisoned compasses. Some geologists-little cells of them in South Africa, the odd don or two at Cambridge-preferred the other explanation, but they were few, and in geology departments around the world everybody would annually crowd in to hear Lucius P. Aenigmatite, Regius Professor of Historical Geology, give his world-renowned lecture ridiculing continental drift. Oil geologists, when they had found what they were looking for in deep sandstones put down by ancient rivers, naturally yearned to know in what direction those rivers had flowed. They had long since learned empirically that if you wanted to zakelijke energie vergelijken find the direction of the stream you had to use different pole positions for well cores of different ages. Whether this was the result of polar wander or continental drift did not much matter to the flying red horse. Other geologists satisfied themselves by deciding that the paleomagnetic compasses were unreliable, notwithstanding that oil companies were using them to make money. Certain English geologists produced confusion by embracing continental drift and then drawing up narratives and maps that showed continents moving all over the earth with respect to a fixed and undriftable England. By the late nineteen-fifties, paleomagnetic evidence had piled up so high that it demanded improved explication. India, for example, yielded data that put it out of harmony with the rest of the world with respect to polar wander. Either there was an inexplicable series of anomalies in the data or India itself had moved, coming up from the Southern Hemisphere and completely crossing the equator, rapidly, and at a rate of speed (as much as twenty-two centimetres a year) completely out of synchronization with the rate at which the equator’s position had differed in other terrains.