Joseph Kerski
speaker
638 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 1 Aug
Joseph Kerski’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
But Wegener went further, claiming that all of the continents were once part of a supercontinent 200 million years ago.
He named this continent Pangaea.
Wegener first outlined his theory in The Origin of Continents and Oceans in 1915,
all the more impressive because he was on active duty during World War I then.
Figener was true to his roots of getting out into the field to conduct investigations, as other geographers in this Thinking Spatially podcast that I have described have done.
In fact, he died in 1930 of overexertion on an expedition to Greenland, seeking to calculate the ice rate of drift.
American geologist Frank Taylor in 1908 suggested that the mountain chains such as the Alps are resulting from continental collisions.
In 1927, British geologist Arthur Holmes said that radioactive heating was the force of continental drift.
In 1937, the South African geologist Alex Dutoit advanced Wegener's theory still further, proposing that there were two supercontinents, Laurasia in the north and Gondwanaland in the south.
Wegener showed that the rock type and age of the rocks in certain places now separated by water was the same, such as India and Antarctica, Australia and Antarctica, India and Africa, and South America and Africa.
He provided studies of the Appalachian Mountains in the USA and the Caledonian Mountains in Scotland, that they were the same type, alignment, and age.
Fossils in those locations as well showed that the same plant and animal species existed there.
such as that of the Triassic land reptiles Listosaurus and Cygnognathus, the fern Glossopterus, and the freshwater reptile Mesosaurus.
Despite this evidence, Wegener's theory did not take hold right away.
Most people scorned his theory, in fact.
At a 1926 symposium, his theory was rejected by everyone except the chairperson of the symposium.
Furthermore, Wegener's evidence was explained in terms of
other, apparently more plausible theories, in part because the explanations Wegener gave for the force propelling the motions of the continents was incorrect.
One of his explanations was that the continents plowed through oceanic crusts like ice-breaking ships move through ice-locked seas, which the scientific community couldn't accept.
Many geologists of Wegener's time believed that the Earth was contracting, causing the mountains to buckle up like wrinkles on a huge raisin.
Showing 101–120 of 638 · page 6 of 32
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