IN ONE OF his last professional acts before his death in 1955, Albert Einstein wrote a shortbut glowing foreword to a book by a geologist named Charles Hapgood entitled Earth』sShifting Crust: A Key to Some Basis of Earth Sce. Hapgood』s book was asteady demolition of the idea that tis were in motion. In a tohat all but ihereader to join him in a tolerant chuckle, Hapgood observed that a few gullible souls hadnoticed 「an apparent corresponden shape betweeain tis.」 It would appear,he went on, 「that South America might be fitted together with Africa, and so on. . . . It is evenclaimed that roations on opposite sides of the Atlantic match.」
Mr. Hapgood briskly dismissed any suotions, noting that the geologists K. E. Casterand J. C. Mendes had doensive fieldwork on both sides of the Atlantid hadestablished beyond question that no such similarities existed. Goodness knows what outessrs. Caster and Mendes had looked at, beacuse in fact many of the roations onboth sides of the Atlanticare the same—not just very similar but the same.
This was not ahat flew with Mr. Hapgood, or many eologists of his day. Thetheory Hapgood alluded to was one first propounded in 1908 by an amateur Amerigeologist named Frank Bursley Taylor. Taylor came from a wealthy family and had both themeans and freedom from academistraints to pursue unventional lines of inquiry. Hewas one of those struck by the similarity in shape between the fag coastlines of AfridSouth America, and from this observation he developed the idea that the tis had onceslid around. He suggested—prestly as it turned out—that the g together oftis could have thrust up the world』s mountain s. He failed, however, to producemu the way of evidence, and the theory was sidered too crackpot to merit seriousattention.
In Germany, however, Taylor』s idea icked up, and effectively appropriated, by atheorist named Alfred Wegener, a meteist at the Uy of Marburg. Wegeneriigated the many plant and fossil anomalies that did not fit fortably into the standardmodel of Earth history and realized that very little of it made sense if ventionallyinterpreted. Animal fossils repeatedly turned up on opposite sides of os that were clearlytoo wide to swim. How, he wondered, did marsupials travel from South America to Australia?
How did identical snails turn up in Sdinavia and New England? And how, e to that,did one at for coal seams and other semi-tropical remnants in frigid spots likeSpitsbergen, four hundred miles north of Norway, if they had not somehow migrated therefrom warmer climes?
Wegener developed the theory that the world』s tis had one together in asingle landmass he called Pangaea, where flora and fauna had been able to mingle, before thetis had split apart and floated off to their present positions. All this he put together in abook called Die Entstehung der Koe und Ozeane, or The in of tis andOs, which ublished in German in 1912 ae the outbreak of the FirstWorld War in the meantime—in English three years later.
Because of the war, Wegener』s theory didn』t attract muotice at first, but by 1920, whenhe produced a revised and expanded edition, it quickly became a subject of discussion.
Everyone agreed that tis moved—but up and down, not sideways. The process ofvertical movement, known as isostasy, was a foundation of geological beliefs feions,though no one had any good theories as to how or why it happened. One idea, which remainedibooks well into my own school days, was the