Why was wegeners idea not accepted

But even he would have been astonished by the charges against the Italians for failing to turn continental drift into a predictive device; that trial is expected to continue for months.

The turnabout on his theory came relatively quickly, in the mids, as older geologists died off and younger ones began to accumulate proof of seafloor spreading and vast tectonic plates grinding across one another deep within the earth. The mile return trip to the coast that November turned desperate. Wegener, at 50, yearned to be home with his wife and three daughters. Somewhere along the way the two men vanished in the endless snow. Richard Conniff, a Smithsonian contributor since , is the author of seven books about human and animal behavior.

Alfred Wegener, in Greenland, c. Post a Comment. The first reason was that his theory of continental drift was just too weak for most geologists to accept. Even though he believed the supercontinent that broke up into different continents moved, he did not have a clear explanation to how the continents moved. The other reason is that some of his explanation clashed with ideas that were widely accepted in the science communities. He used similar fossils from different continents to back up his theory of continental drift.

Although this sounds like a great idea, there was no real evidence for it, either. Alfred Wegener died in on an expedition on the Greenland icecap. Improve this page Learn More.

Skip to main content. Module 5: Plate Tectonics. Search for:. Reading: Wegener and the Continental Drift Hypothesis Scientists still do not appear to understand sufficiently that all earth sciences must contribute evidence toward unveiling the state of our planet in earlier times, and that the truth of the matter can only be reached by combining all this evidence.

Wegener, The Origins of Continents and Oceans , first published in Did you have an idea for improving this content? Licenses and Attributions. Those scientists that had built their reputations and Doctrinal Thesis on the Geosyncline theory violently opposed the Continental Drift Theory. Even today geological theory is based on the assumption of uniformtarism, The Continental Drift theory proposed changes in the geological process that were sudden, catastrophic, and not what had been previously observed.

The present is the key to the past is the foundational statement of uniform process. Continental Drift challenged the idea that the continents were much the same today as in the past. These ideas were heresy to the community of Geological scientists had to be rejected. The timeline of evolutionary history as first outlined in was not compatible with the movements of the continents proposed by Continental Drift. The Geosyncline theory provided a means of explaining how the deep ocean fossils came to found in neat horizontal layers on the continents.

Gaylord Simpson a prominent evolutionary scientists opposed plate tectonics the modern form of Continental Drift up through the 's despite the strong evidence for the theory because of the difficulties in the evolutionary timeline.