The Continental Drift Controversy

The definitive account of the early debate over Wegener's theory of continental drift, based on extensive interviews and archival material.

Henry R. Frankel (Author)

9780521875042, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 26 April 2012

625 pages, 36 b/w illus.
25.4 x 17.9 x 3.2 cm, 1.38 kg

Praise for the 4-volume collection: '… an unparalleled study of remarkable depth, detail and quality of a key development in our ideas about how the Earth functions … because Frankel draws on his extensive oral historical work with the key players in the development of plate tectonics, this is a study which can never be repeated in terms of its proximity to the events narrated, so many of those key players now being deceased.' Progress in Physical Geography

Resolution of the sixty year debate over continental drift, culminating in the triumph of plate tectonics, changed the very fabric of Earth science. This four-volume treatise on the continental drift controversy is the first complete history of the origin, debate and gradual acceptance of this revolutionary theory. Based on extensive interviews, archival papers and original works, Frankel weaves together the lives and work of the scientists involved, producing an accessible narrative for scientists and non-scientists alike. This first volume covers the period in the early 1900s when Wegener first pointed out that the Earth's major landmasses could be fitted together like a jigsaw and went on to propose that the continents had once been joined together in a single landmass, which he named Pangaea. It describes the reception of Wegener's theory as it splintered into sub-controversies and geoscientists became divided between the 'fixists' and 'mobilists'.

1. How the mobilism debate was structured
2. Wegener and Taylor develop their theories of continental drift
3. Sub-controversies in the drift debate, 1920s–50s
4. The mechanism sub-controversy: 1921–51
5. Arthur Holmes and his theory of substratum convection, 1915–55
6. Regionalism and the reception of mobilism: South Africa, India and South America from the 1920s through the early 1950s
7. Regional reception of mobilism in North America: 1920s through the 1950s
8. Reception and development of mobilism in Europe: 1920s through the 1950s
9. Fixism's popularity in Australia: 1920s to middle 1960s
Index.

Subject Areas: Earth sciences [RB], Earth sciences, geography, environment, planning [R]