January 6, 1912. Alexander Wegener publishes theory of continental drift.

[rug]

Alfred Wegener first thought of this idea by noticing that the different large landmasses of the Earth almost fit together like a jigsaw puzzle. The Continental shelf of the Americas fit closely to Africa and Europe, and Antarctica, Australia, India and Madagascar fitted next to the tip of Southern Africa. But Wegener only took action after reading a paper in 1911 and seeing that a flooded land-bridge contradicts isostasy. Wegener's main interest was meteorology, and he wanted to join the Denmark-Greenland expedition scheduled for mid-1912. He presented his Continental Drift hypothesis on 6 January 1912. He analyzed both sides of the Atlantic Ocean for rock type, geological structures and fossils. He noticed that there was a significant similarity between matching sides of the continents, especially in fossil plants.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Wegener

[NightWatcher]

1. Who else as a kid thought the same?

It's obvious that the land masses were once connected.

I was a smart 7 year old and it's all been downhill since then.

[rug]

2. In my grammar school there was a world map hanging on the wall.

I noticed how South America seemed to match Africa but I never got the India thing until I learned about the Himalayas.

[struggle4progress]

13. If only we had all been born in 1900! As a gang of 7 year-olds, we could have scooped him!

[rug]

16. Nobel Prize!

[struggle4progress]

17. At the very least, we'd have Crater NightWatcher, Crater Rug, and Crater Struggle4Progress

named after us on Mars

I'll have to tell my parents I've discovered yet another way they failed me: I was born fifty years after my time

[lastlib]

7. We all KNOW this is BS!

Last edited Fri Jan 6, 2017, 08:59 PM - Edit history (1)

EVERYBODY KNOWS the Bible says the world is only 6000 years old, and if God wanted continents to move, He would've put wheels on 'em. But He put 'em right where He wanted 'em!

[csziggy]

3. In 1973 when I tookl geology it was still being disputed

I did a project for the class where I put the continental plates as of one period on a globe, adjusting for the curvature. The professor had been using flat projection maps to illustrate continental drift but that avoided some of the problems. Most people had concentrated on the matches between the land masses on either side of the Atlantic Ocean, but not much had been done with the Pacific or polar regions.

One of the big difficulties was that Alaska and the north eastern part of Asia did not fit - they over lapped. It turns out that Alaska is made up of a lot of pieces of plates and at the time period I was trying to image it was not one land mass. That was discovered some years after my project.

[rug]

4. Interesting how theories become proven and then accepted fact.

Admittedly, floating continents are preposterous at first blush, but there you have it.

[csziggy]

5. I think part of the resistance to the idea was that the structure of inner earth was unknown

Once the science of seismology was fully developed and they realized that the inner earth was liquid with the solid land suspended on magma, continental drift made sense. "In 1926, Harold Jeffreys was the first to claim, based on his study of earthquake waves, that below the mantle, the core of the Earth is liquid." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seismology#History)

Before that, it seemed silly to think of rock moving around on rock.

[hunter]

8. I knew some of the people who were studying magnetic striping in the Pacific.

There wasn't anyone left in the Earth Sciences department who disputed continental drift, and they probably would have flunked any student who disputed it.

This was the later 'seventies.

My own fascination was ocean chemistry.

It was utterly obvious by then that ocean chemistry couldn't be explained by simple models of water flowing off the land, carrying various salts with it. The numbers simply didn't add up. But people were realizing the immensity of hydrothermal interactions at spreading centers and other hot spots, and the amount of material, including water, dragged down under the crust at subduction zones.

The math in my paper was a pathetic reflection of what was known even then, but I'm still interested in the contribution life itself has made to the drifting of the continents and the composition of seawater. The transformation of earth's atmosphere from a reducing environment to an oxidizing environment changed everything.

And the carbonates... It's amazing (if not terrifying) the impact human Carbon Dioxide emissions are having on seawater chemistry and ocean life. The age of humans will be a very distinctive layer in the geologic record.

[csziggy]

9. That was actively being worked on when I was taking my courses

My professor was working with cores from some of the ocean sampling. As a undergraduate non-geology major I never got to work with him on any of those so I don't know where they came from. (I ended up three hours short of a geology minor - which worked well with my Anthropology and Library Science majors. I didn't have the chemistry background or interest in getting it to go further.)

Sea floor spreading was appreciated by the time I was taking the classes, but they didn't really understand subduction zones and how it all worked together to move the plates.

I was good with maps and visualizing which is why I did my project. As the daughter of an mining engineer I already had a knowledge of rocks and subsurface structures so I had an advantage over most of the students.

[hunter]

11. Alas, I was a psychotic mess in college.

I was "asked" to take time off twice, the implied threat being permanent expulsion. But I must have made an impression on my paleontology professor because he helped get me readmitted to school for a third try, and this time I was successful. Looking back, a large part of that was improved meds.

A year later I was qualified to teach science in the big city. That was by far the most difficult job I've ever had, but it's also how I met my wife.

The crew I knew were towing magnetometers through the water, looking for places that might be interesting to explore in submersibles or to take samples. Some of them were still a little peeved the U.S. Navy hadn't shared its best technology with them sooner.

When I wasn't doing biology or geology stuff I was living in the computer labs, sometimes literally, if you don't count my car.

[csziggy]

12. Me, too - I dropped out three times

First, because the liberal arts college I first attended was not a good fit, plus I had two roommates from hell who drove me up the wall.

The second time was when my allergies to fragrances tortured me after Herbal Essence shampoo became the rage. It got so bad I could not walk down the halls of the dorm or use the communal bathroom for hours after anyone used that stuff.

The third time was when I ran out of courses to take for my major and got burned out on filler courses. I worked for the state for a while then my parents offered to pay for me to finish my degree. I ended up with a double major and no minor.

I knew guys that hung out in the computer lab - we all liked sci fi movies - but I never got into computers until 1982. When I discovered what I could do with accounting, word processing and graphics, I was hooked!

Never really used my BS degree - I bought a farm and bred and boarded horses until I physically could not do the work. Now I'm retired and busier than ever with genealogy, DU, and needlework.

[hunter]

14. The first time I was "asked" to leave college was for fighting with a TA.

I'd vehemently disagreed about something he was teaching as gospel, we started arguing, and then he started throwing things at me, starting with chalk and escalating to a big textbook. Then he accidentally knocked over the overhead projector... I didn't leave my seat. I found out later I'd been attacking his graduate thesis.

But there were other things too. I had a friendly relationship with the campus police. I was an interesting diversion from their usual sordid late night or early morning duties, mostly involving drunk people. I didn't often drink, it interfered with my coding and I never had any beer money anyways.

The last time I was readmitted to school, I had to promise the dean I wouldn't torment the teaching assistants. Awkwardly, the teaching assistant I'd messed with had been his. I now see what a miserable job teaching assistants have, but I was pretty clueless then; a socially inept computer geek.

Our youngest kid had to take a medical leave from college and subsequently had a lot of trouble getting the courses he needed to graduate. It was like the university didn't care, and maybe they don't, because that cost us a lot of money. When I was in school, and when you were in school, it didn't cost nearly so much as it does now.

Most of my nieces are crazy about horses. As children they had rooms full of ribbons and trophies for their horsemanship. Our family is largely matriarchal and non-sexist, but girls like horses an boys like motorcycles. What's that about? Maybe boys are generally less able to empathize with giant animals. I'm always amazed to watch school-age girls bossing these giant creatures about. Science fiction-wise, it's easy to imagine them taming dragons.

I've explored the genealogy of my own wild west family, a lot of them non-Mormons living in Mormon territory, and most of it seems to be fabricated. My last immigrant ancestor was a mail order bride to Salt Lake City. She didn't like sharing a husband and ran off with a monogamous guy.

I figure many of my ancestors jumped off the ship and hit the ground running. There also seems to be a lot of Irish Catholic that no one ever confessed to. Nope, no Irish here.

This may also explain the fluidity of names in my family. Nobody raises an eyebrow if someone changes their name, even kids. It used to confuse me. We had cousins we'd meet once a year and I'd be certain I remembered their names but now they'd have an entirely different unrelated name.

My grandfather and his sister once commissioned a genealogy that gave them a proud Scottish heritage, but it was bullshit, the "genealogist" telling them what they wanted to hear. The funny thing is that neither of them answered to the names on their birth certificates. When my grandfather passed away my dad had a lot of trouble getting his official records straight. None of them matched. Before computers and giant databases it wasn't a difficult mischief. His California Drivers license had him a few years younger than he actually was. After my grandma died and my grandpa was looking for girlfriends he'd ask me to tell people I was his son. A grandchild my age might make him look old.



My wife is Mexican-Irish-Native-American, she even has an ancestor who came through Ellis Island. The Catholic Church kept pretty good records. Her genealogy is much clearer.

[csziggy]

15. You sound like some of the computer guys I knew

I was the only girl in that group and they liked me more for my interest and knowledge of science fiction books and films than for the fact I was a girl. A couple of them had to change schools because in graduate school they knew code better than the TAs and got into trouble because of it.

The thing with girls and horses - I think it is BECAUSE they can boss around those half ton animals. Boys tend to try to force the horses to do their will - girls know that strength is not the key, psychology and leverage are what does let them have control. Horses are good for girls - aside from the physical benefits, horses teach girls to be assertive and that gives them confidence.

Your family history sounds interesting - but I know a lot of the old genealogy info is BS. My grandmother bought a genealogy published in the 1880s about her mother's family that claims it went back to various European royalty. Yeah, maybe but so far I have not found any records that verify any of that. Grandmother also wrote up little bios on the family members she knew or that she had stories about. Both her great whatever grandfather from Lincolnshire, England and her husband's Welsh grandfather were described as being big land owners. Not true - and she knew that it wasn't about the Lincolnshire group.

She had a letter written to her great great grandmother from a brother. The gg grandmother's husband had died, leaving her a penniless widow with six small children. Her brother wrote back, talking about all the debts he and their father had, the illnesses they suffered, and offering her religion as a sop. Maybe he was just angry because she married a man the family disapproved of and they moved to a new country, but he never sent her a penny.

As for the Welsh side, they were tenant farmers and worked in the mines when the farming wasn't good. The family moved around a lot though they stayed near the same small town in Caridiganshire and they were never worth much money according to the census. I think that is why my great grandfather and his brother left Wales and came to the US. They both ended up starting businesses and while they weren't wealthy they were solidly middle class by the time they died. Both my grandfather and his brother became engineers so they did even better in life.

Those two branches are the shortest in my genealogy. I haven't gotten them earlier than 1800 but I'm chipping away.

I'm lucky in that I have inherited decades of genealogical research. My great great grandfather and his cousin exchanged letters about their ancestry and we have some of those. My grandmother had enough evidence to join DAR about 1912. My mother researched her family after marrying Dad, starting in the 1950s, and my husband's family has a similar background. Most of what I do is digitize and look for records recently available online.

[Hassin Bin Sober]

10. If that knowledge cost the oil companies money, we would STILL be disputing it.

[True Dough]

6. I couldn't blame those other continents

if they drifted even farther in an effort to put more distance between themselves and Trump.