The Pangea Puzzle

When I was a kid, I loved playing with globes. I liked that I could figure out where I was, then find places I had visited that were shockingly close by where I was on the map, and imagining what those other places might be like.

I couldn’t help but notice something cartographers had noticed for centuries: it looked an awful lot like South America and Africa were puzzle pieces that could fit together. Could it be possible that they were once connected?

If I wondered this as a kid, it’s no wonder that some very powerful minds were working on this very problem around the turn of the 20th century, right as the convergence of technology and scientific understanding were coming together in brand new ways.

One of these smart people was Alfred Wegener, a German meteorologist who was curious about all sorts of things. Wegener was very plugged into the scientific literature at the time, and he knew about the similarities of fossil plants and animals found on opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean.

It wasn’t just that he was tuned in and that he noticed the shape of the outline of the continents, either. Wegener had a background of interests that I can only describe as polymathic, and some of the professors he studied under were among the best minds in physics, including Max Planck.

After achieving a doctorate in astronomy, Wegener remained passionately interested in meteoroglogy and how our atmosphere worked. He and his brother, Kurt, set the record for the longest balloon flight right around the same time the Wright brothers were getting something heavier than air off the ground for the first time.

Over time, Wegener’s interdisciplinary approach allowed him to understand the big picture better than anyone before him. Unafraid to go down rabbit holes, he took the same facile observation I made as a kid (and countless other mapmakers had made over the centuries), and peeled back layer after layer across multiple fields in a way only someone who studies multiple fields could do.

Fortunately, his field work to Greenland had prepared him for some of the thinking he would need to do. There, Wegener had seen the effects of glacier formation up close, and geological formations were much easier to see on the island, where bare rock met the air with no thin layer of vegetation to obscure the process.

Glaciers are enormous, and seeing how they could move around gave Wegener a lot to consider. He started thinking what sorts of forces would move things bigger than glaciers around, like masses of land.

With this unique background, Wegener was able to make a curious assertion: that the further back in time you went, the closer the continents were together. If you wound the clock back far enough, there was only one land mass.

Wegener noticed that the fossil record supported his idea, too. There were identical species divided by an ocean, like Mesosaurus being found in both South America and Africa, and plenty of plant fossils in common. Similar types of rocks, too, were found in places that seemed to correspond with continental puzzle pieces fitting together.

Bigger geological features, too, seemed to match up way too conveniently for this to all be a coincidence.

All of this was enough for Wegener to publish a book called The Origin of Continents and Oceans in 1915. Like with the Big Bang theory, there was an awful lot of skepticism in the mainstream scientific community when this idea was first put out there.

In the same way that cosmology pushed back with the Steady State theory, the geological scientific consensus was a sort of steady state of continental drift. In other words, there wasn’t any drift.

Here, though, was a revolutionary idea destined to become mainstream. Over the next several decades, as more and more evidence from fossils, geology, climatology, and more came in, it became evident that a supercontinent of sorts had indeed once existed.

Today, we call this Pangea, although Wegener called it Urkontinent, meaning primal continent in German.