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Dinesh club

Posted: 20 Dec 2023

Taken: 15 Dec 2023

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The Late Ordovician world

The Late Ordovician world
North America straddles the equator and is rotated almost 90 degrees with the early Appalachian forming a range of its southern coast. Most of the continent is covered by a shallow sea (Colorado Plateau Geosystem Inc)

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 Dinesh
Dinesh club
The theory of Continental drift was most famously developed by Alfred Wegener, a German meteorologist whose studies brought him, as most scientific pursuits did at the turn of the twentieth century, to the high Arctic. On expeditions to Greenland, he developed a vision of the continents as similar to the great ie floes that surrounded him: calving apart, drifting and crashing into each other over great expanse of time, and at one point forming a supercontinent in the deep past that he called ‘Pangaea,’ meaning “all earth”. Wegner came to this revelation by making the same observation that most six-year-olds do: that the continents roughly fit together, like puzzle pieces. On top of that, fossils seem to form bands that jump the oceans and connect disparate parts ofthe world by prehistoric biology. Despite a persuasive case he made, Wegener was roundly dismissed by his contemporaries and didn’t live to see his vindication. Like all good Victorian Arctic explorers, he died valiantly on the ice, where he remains today, buried under perhaps 100 feet of snow.

The idea Wegener left behind, continental drift, would eventually upend all of geology. The state of the science before midcentury was not unlike that of astronomy before the conceptual revolutions of Galileo and Copernicus, and explanations of the planet’s geological features shared the same tortured logic of Ptolemy’s epicycles. But when bathymetric surveys of the seafloor in the last 1950s and early ‘60s showed gigantic underwater volcanic mountains ranges encircling the world like the seams of a baseball, pushing the continents appear, suddenly everything in geology made sense: volcanoes,, earthquakes, island arcs, mountain ranges, deep see trenches, the distribution of fossils, and strange complementary borders of the continents, which were indeed once united in a globe spanning supercontinent hundreds of millions of years ago – just as Wegener has surmised. . . . . Page 119
4 months ago. Edited 4 months ago.

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