THE GEODETIC EVIDENCE CONCERNING WEGENER'S HYPOTHESIS

Abstract

Twenty years ago there seemed to be many good reasons for supposing that Wegener's hypothesis of Continental Drift was untenable. There seemed to be unsurmountable objections to it from a point of view of a mechanism capable of causing tectonic movements of such magnitude; there was disagreement over the correspondence of the orogenic belts in the areas of the earth which are supposed formerly to have been united, as well as over other major geological factors; there was the gravest discordance between the known palaeontological facts and those demanded by the theory; after examination of the geodetic evidence, at least one distinguished geodesist pronounced that it was insufficient. General opinion to-day has perhaps changed and there now appears to be a marked tendency to recognise the cogency of some of Wegener's general arguments and to pay greater attention to the possibilities which he propounded, because it is becoming increasingly clear that the question of the arrangement and of the stability of the primary structural units of the Earth's surface, during geological time, is one of the fundamental problems of geology, as well as of all the allied subjects of geophysics, geomorphology, geodesy, palaeoclimatology and palaeontology. This is the writer's opinion, for what it is worth, after studying the considerable literature on this important and fascinating subject which has accumulated in the course of the past 30 years, during part of a recent leave spent in “browsing” round the Schools and libraries of Cambridge University.