don't you just love it when you're right
Garci do and so to scientists though the
scientific method makes us have to
pretend like we aren't effect is the
whole of scientific history is filled
with people who were totally right and
everybody thought they were wrong today
I want to tell you about one of those
people he changed the way that we look
at the earth Alfred Wegener was born in
1880 in Germany he was one of those rare
people that's just good at and
interested in a lot of different things
he got a degree in astronomy but went
into the relatively young field of
meteorology where he pioneered the use
of balloons to track air currents and
went on expeditions to Greenland to
study polar weather at which he was
totally badass
he's been winners and a hut drilling ice
cores and he also made the longest
crossing of Greenland's ice cap on foot
for the wind but he was also interested
in other stuff including geophysics
which is why he got totally obsessed
with this he couldn't help but notice
like some schoolchildren will that
Africa and South America almost looked
like puzzle pieces sure they're
thousands of miles apart but they really
look like they fit together of course
other people picked up on this like I
said you probably did around fourth
grade but another one of second ears
great qualities is that he wasn't afraid
to ask the stupid sounding question so
we just started asking people continents
moving is that a thing and if it was a
thing how would we know that it was a
thing and because he was a voraciously
curious guy he was looking for the
answers to those questions in all kinds
of places and guess what he found out
that fossils of the same plant species
had been found on both sides of the
Atlantic he discovered that the geology
of the Appalachians was almost identical
to that of the Scottish Highlands and he
learned that distinctive rock strata
found in South Africa were the same as
in parts of Brazil almost as if the
continents I don't know drifting finally
in 1914 while laid up in a military
hospital bed during World War one he
pieced together his theory that all of
the land masses on earth used to be part
of a single continent called the
continent or the origin of all
continents and over time the masses
moved scattering fossils and rock
patterns
round-the-world the next year he
published his research in a book the
origin of continents and oceans and the
scientific community responded they
totally freaked out on him geologists
dismissed him as a glorified weatherman
they held entire conferences devoted to
debunking his book even his
father-in-law who was the most
prestigious meteorologist in Germany
told him he should have probably stuck
to the balloon thing the conventional
wisdom at the time was that continents
used to be connected by land bridges
that later collapsed or were covered by
the oceans and that's how they explained
stuff like matching plant fossils of
course begginer didn't do himself any
favors by being actually pretty wrong
about a lot of stuff like he could not
explain he had no idea how the
continents actually drifted he thought
they were just plowing through the
Earth's crust like an ice breaker he
also suggested that the centrifugal
force of the Earth's rotation was
causing the continents to drift which is
just totally kind of crazy yeah so the
damage had been done and everybody in
Germany thought he was total crazy
person no one would hire him to teach
anywhere the only job he could get was
as a meteorology professor and Austria
and that is where he was in 1930 where
he decided he wanted to go back to
Greenland to set up some weather
stations and during the weeks long
excursion to bring supplies to one of
these remote stations Alfred Wegener
disappeared in a blizzard his body was
found the following spring and it is
still there today buried in the ice I
know right because he was right I mean
not about everything but about a lot of
stuff and at the time of his death
people were just starting to understand
what the floor of the ocean actually
looked like and decades later that
research showed that there were giant
rifts and mountain ranges under the
oceans and those were the boundaries
where continental plates were pulling
away from each other or crashing against
each other it wasn't until the 1960s
that plate tectonics became something
widely accepted by the scientific
community though he wasn't vindicated
during his lifetime he is now respected
as one of the greatest scientists of his
era and you could pay your respects to
him through one of the many things in
science that are now named after him
including the Alfred Wegener Institute
for polar and marine research or the
Vega nor Peninsula of Greenland where he
died or craters on both the Moon and
Mars so thanks here dr. Vecna all of
these fascinating things
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