Title text:
The inflection point was probably in late 1966 or 1967, so when Neil Armstrong flew to space on Gemini 8, plate tectonics was not widely accepted, but when he landed on the Moon three years later it was the mainstream consensus.
Transcript:
Transcript will show once it’s been added to explainxkcd.com
Source: https://xkcd.com/3159/
This is just wrong though. The theory of continental drift was proposed hundreds of years ago. We just didn’t know how it happened. Plate tectonics is just the mechanism that explains it.
Just like people knew that they needed to breath to survive for a long time before we knew that it was because there was oxygen in the air that our cells needed to under go cellular respiration.
Of course people hypothesized continents have drifted, but that wasn’t widely accepted until a mechanism of how that could have happened was proposed. I don’t think xkcd was suggesting that nobody had the idea of continental drift before 1967, just that it wasn’t the consensus.
And we gained a pretty damn good idea during World War 2 and the Cold War when we were trying to map parts of the ocean floor for submarine warfare purposes, and discovered the mid ocean fault points. Especially the true extent of the
Mariana Trench,Mid-Atlantic Ridge which is spang in the middle of the Atlantic between the jigsaw puzzle coastlines of Africa and South America.Needless to say we weren’t to keen to blab to our enemies just how much we knew about the seafloor, and neither were they. What with submarine warfare being a Big Deal in the Cold War, and all.
Edit to add some additional detail now that I’m not pecking on my phone: Alfred Wegener proposed his almost-modern theory of continental drift in 1912, as well as the hypothesis of Pangea, the prehistoric supercontinent from the time when all the current major landmasses were together. You’re right that there was not a solid explanation for the mechanism by which this proposed action ought to occur. But even by the 1940s scientists were proposing that continental drift happened by way of the continents floating on convection currents of magma underneath and predicted there would be expansion joints in between them in the middle of the oceans.
Mariana Trench, which is spang in the middle of the Atlantic between the jigsaw puzzle coastlines of Africa and South America.
Maybe I’m not understanding you, but the Mariana Trench is in the Pacific Ocean, near Guam.
No, I’m wrong. It’s the Mid-Atlantic ridge.
Yeah, it drifted there since the 40s.
Some people just don’t watch the news. 🙄 Marianas Trench relocated off the coast of North Carolina back in like 2020.
I have to believe that as soon as there were accurate maps of South America’s east coast and Africa’s west coast, someone must have looked at them and said – you know, I bet those two were joined at some point in the past.
According to A Short History of Nearly Everything, plate tectonics is a very new idea, within my lifetime new. I forget the numbers, but the author states that by the 1980s a large minority of geologists still didn’t believe in it.
He prefaces this with stories of naturalists being puzzled over the age of the Earth. They couldn’t explain what they had observed if the Earth was only 10s of millions of years old.
Awesome book BTW. It’s a history of science, what we knew and when and how we figured it out.
Yes, plate tectonics is recent. But it explains how continents move. The comics says that before 1967, no thought they moved at all. Which is false.
Yeah but dinosaurs didn’t exist because the Bible only kinda mentions them.
Bill Brysons books are amazing! Since you like Short History,I highly recommend At Home, also by Bryson.
Just found an epub!
I take everything he says with a grain of salt, though.
This is wise when reading or hearing anything
but then I would get salt overdose and high blood pressure
Yep. I later found inaccuracies in A Short History of Nearly Everything. Nothing that changed much, but still, I wasn’t nitpicking either.
It is correct about when plate tectonics theory became mainstream consensus. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plate_Tectonics_Revolution
Yes, plate tectonics is recent. But it explains how continents move. The comics says that before 1967, no thought they moved at all. Which is false.
Dunno, I studied geology and my older lecturers told us that when they were students plate tectonics wasn’t an established science. There are plenty of other theories for how mountains formed
Yes, plate tectonics is recent. But it explains how continents move. The comics says that before 1967, no thought they moved at all. Which is false.
Breathe*
“isn’t it amazing how Africa and South America seem to fit together? I wonder what caused that”
“I dunno, probably magic”
I mean, this is directly one of the main observations that led to plate tectonic theory…
I mean anything we can’t explain out in space is just dark matter or dark energy. We could just call it magic, cause that’s about our level of understanding.
What? It was known in France. My grand-grandfather who died in 2005 always talked about it according to family. Everyone in town knew in 1950
