Supercontinent: Ten Billion Years in the Life of Our Planet

by Ted Nield

  Martin and Korn were not on the run for their lives. In the desert their lives were in just as much danger as they would have been in an internment camp. Yet – and Martin’s book does not make this clear, perhaps because it would have been too painful a thing to say in post-war Germany – the prospect of internment was not made so appalling by the fact of imprisonment alone, or even fear of the regime in whatever camp might have received them. It was fear of their fellow internees, who would most likely have been ardent Nazis.

  Forsaking the hideous regime in their native Germany for the freedom of the southern African desert in the late 1930s, Martin and Korn found themselves in one of the bastions of free tectonic thought and quickly became aligned with it. Here, where geological evidence for the break-up of Gondwanaland was at its most stark and undeniable, Wegener already had his greatest champion. In the heart of Suess’s old imagined domain, amid the reality of evidence that the great London-born Austrian had first pieced together from books in Vienna, Henno Martin and Hermann Korn found themselves walking in the footsteps of one of the greatest field geologists of all time: Alexander du Toit.

  In 1961, just as the tide was beginning to turn for Wegener’s theory, Henno Martin delivered a memorial lecture to Alex du Toit at the Geological Society of South Africa, appropriately entitled ‘The hypothesis of continental drift in the light of recent advances of geological knowledge in Brazil and south west Africa’. The paper was a development of Namibia-based work he and Korn had carried out (partly during their desert exile) and published in the decades before; gathering detailed evidence of the ancient glaciation in that geologically unknown region, and fitting it together with the patterns of glacier movement first assembled by Suess and later taken up by Wegener in his reconstruction of Pangaea.

  Martin’s later work in Brazil, which sought to make the correlations between sequences now separated by the South Atlantic more precise and therefore persuasive, followed pioneering work in the same vein by du Toit. South Africa’s greatest geologist, a man decent and truthful to the roots of his hair, came in 1924 to be on another continent pretending to the Carnegie Institution of Washington, which was paying his expenses, that he had nothing more on his mind than the simple collection of data whereas in fact he was looking for evidence to prove a rogue theory that most geologists (and especially geophysicists) in the USA ridiculed.

  The ‘colonist’

  Alexander Logie du Toit was born in 1878 at Klein Schuur, under the shadow of Devil’s Peak and Table Mountain, in the Colony of the Cape of Good Hope. His protestant family, which originated around Lille in northern France, began its journey to South Africa from the Netherlands, where it had been driven by religious persecution. From there in 1687, two brothers du Toit sailed for the Cape, establishing their family dynasty one year ahead of the main body of Huguenot settlers, who contributed so much (include wine-making expertise) to South Africa. Du Toit eventually became one of the most widespread family names among the province’s settlers.

  The other element in du Toit’s genetics was Scottish. Shortly after the British took over the Cape, Alexander Logie, a naval captain from Fochabers, Inverness, married into the family and took over the estate at Klein Schuur. Scots genes, however, had a little more difficulty gaining entry. Alexander, having no children of his own, adopted his wife’s nephew (also called Alexander Logie du Toit) as his son and heir. He eventually came to marry his cousin, Anna Logie. Their union produced four children, the eldest destined to become South Africa’s first and greatest home-grown geologist.

  Du Toit graduated from the forerunner of the University of Cape Town and then attended the Royal Technical College in Glasgow, where, in 1899, he qualified in Mining Engineering. After two years studying at London’s Royal College of Science, he was invited back to Glasgow, where he held two posts, as lecturer in Mining Engineering at the Royal Technical College and in Geology at Glasgow University. Then, in 1903, du Toit sailed back to the Cape to join its new Geological Commission, charged since 1895 with geological surveys and mapping in the resource-rich colony.

  In the years between beginning work in 1903 and leaving the Survey in 1920, he mapped in detail over 50,000 square miles between the Cape and Natal. Of this enormous area, nearly 43,000 square miles found its way into published geological maps. Much of his work was carried out from a donkey wagon, his mobile home kept by his diligent and long-suffering Scottish wife. From this vehicle he would venture out across trackless mountain and veldt on a bicycle. And that is not all. Geological mapping depends on having a base topographic map – or today an aerial or satellite picture – on which the geologist plots his rock types and readings of technical measurements. Nothing useful can be done without one. However, for much of the area du Toit mapped, there were no such maps. So he made them too, using a small plane table (a level sighting and drawing surface mounted on a tripod) that he would carry with him on his bike. In effect he mapped much of this vast area twice.

  There is always a tendency to beatify the departed in their obituaries, but reports of du Toit’s character are too consistent for this to be the case with him. For all his stature and eventual fame among fellow geologists, du Toit was innately modest, eternally wary of limelight, kind and generous with people he met, in whom he clearly took a warm and sympathetic interest whatever their status. Reports abound of his phenomenal powers of recall, he not only wrote everything down but remembered where he wrote it down. Yet, as with Suess, his attention to detail was matched by an equal flair for the grand vision. He was also an unstinting worker, whose superhuman capacity for physical and mental effort continued almost unabated right up until his death, from a cancer diagnosed two years before but which he bore in silence and in secret.

  One would think that he must have been an impossibly saintly man, were it not for the sly twinkle in so many of his portraits and an ingrained liking for devilment, for upsetting the applecart. The first inkling of this trait would come from his air of faintly amused detachment, his quaint and subtle sense of humour and certain unexpected pleasures. He had an unnerving tendency in company to spring up suddenly and recite questionable limericks. His musicality extended to a lifelong love of playing the oboe; and at one stage this outwardly quiet and unassuming intellectual took up motorcycle racing. He cut a strange figure for a rebel, but rebel he was.

  Back in the USA

  If anyone needed an example of how a theory’s acceptance could have benefited from a bit of simple PR, then Alfred Wegener’s book On the Origin of Continents and Oceans provides it. The truth is that Wegener could not have done more to antagonize scientists in the USA if he had tried.

  Derek Ager was able to write in 1961 that while he himself was (then) in a minority among British geologists in opposing drift, ‘American geologists appear to regard the Declaration of Independence as retroactive to the Palaeozoic.’ The hypothesis of continental drift was nowhere more despised and rejected than in the United States, and by the late 1950s it set the ‘island continent’ apart from the rest of the scientific world. This division today seems all the more remarkable because now you might be forgiven for thinking it was American geophysicists who invented it. The truth of how this schism came about is an object lesson in the influence of prevailing culture upon science; and how it was eventually healed, as the great supercontinent of science reunited around a new paradigm, demonstrates the self-correcting nature of the scientific endeavour.

  Objectivity in science is a contentious and difficult issue. At its heart lies a basic question: how should a scientist approach nature? To take two extremes: one, you go to nature and record what you observe. You clear your mind of any explanatory theories and amass data. But factual data on their own do not explain anything, so after all this observational effort you allow explanations to emerge. This is called the inductive method. Alternatively, you can first develop a theory – a hypothesis – about how you think nature works, and then go out to test that theory by observation. This is called the d
eductive method, or sometimes the hypothetico-deductive method.

  At their extremes these two approaches produce, in one case, colourless fact-gathering, and in the other, an unhealthy dominance of ruling theory that blinds the observer to observations that don’t fit. Clearly, the way in which science really works is a sensible and pragmatic mixture of the two; but balancing them has always been fraught with difficulty, not least in geology.

  Many early geological thinkers in the eighteenth century had deductive tendencies. They imagined all-embracing ‘theories of the Earth’, expounded in thick tomes that offered ideological frameworks of how the Earth evolved into its present state. By the time the Geological Society of London was founded in 1807, after the spectacular failure of several such ruling theories, advanced thought had swung back towards the inductive method. The general mood of the time was that science needed more facts. The stirrings of an ‘Anglo-Saxon’ approach to science were beginning to make themselves felt. The great early theorists of the Earth had been chiefly French and German. And while the Scots geologist James Hutton (1726–97), originator of uniformitarianism, also called his great book Theory of the Earth, his approach was truly more aligned with the observers than the grand theorizers.

  Not that Hutton lacked grand theory. It was his concept of judging the record of the past by extrapolating from the present that Charles Lyell developed into its extreme form in the nineteenth century; and thus gave the whole tenor of the research conducted and published by the Geological Society of London its objective, inductive cast. This was very much in opposition to the caricature of continental science as over-theoretical and dogmatic, driven by God-like professors with their ruling theories and personal authority. This caricature, like all good caricatures, has some basis in truth, and is reflected in the German term Weltall that is given to this kind of theory and which means ‘whole world’.

  Geologists in the USA, however, were facing other problems. First, there was the immensity of the continent – still largely unexplored – to be documented. Second, they remained deeply suspicious of European ‘authority’. They knew that evidence about the way the Earth worked that derived from their continent should carry no less weight than that from any other part of the globe. Moreover, they preserved a revolutionary dislike of pronouncements from on high. Somehow their science also had to declare independence. They had to find a new way of doing science, a democratic method that eschewed discredited Old World ways.

  What they hit on, first of all, was induction. But realizing that this cure could end up being worse than the disease, and recognizing that the collection of data alone was not what science was about, America strove to develop a third way of its own, a method called multiple working hypotheses.

  Under this method the scientist, like a good parent dividing his attention equally and impartially among his offspring, first presented his factual findings in as ‘theory-free’ a way as possible, and then discussed the observations in the light of as many different explanations as seemed reasonable. If in due course a leading theory or two emerged, these must be further refined by the subsequent collection of more data. From the end of the nineteenth century this approach quickly became the accepted, democratic, American way of science.

  Into the middle of this new, republican method of doing science, expressly devised to counterbalance that outmoded, system-based theorizing of the Old World, dropped Wegener’s On the Origin of Continents and Oceans.

  Blast from the past

  Even today, with our modern obsession with ‘directed’ research, and when a scientist applying for research money won’t stand a chance of getting any unless he or she appears to be testing some grand hypothesis, Wegener’s book makes strange reading. But to Americans in the mid-1920s, which was when J. G. A. Skerl’s translation came out there, it read more like an affront to decent society.

  We have already met Skerl, the man who should strictly be credited with introducing the English-speaking world to the word ‘Pangaea’. It is fair to say that his translation must share some of the blame for the revulsion that greeted Wegener’s book in the USA. From its opening paragraphs, everything that was upright, noble and distinctive about American-style scientific method was, it seemed, being given a deliberate and blatant slap in the face.

  The ideology behind American science was that it had no ideology. It built on the British model of facts first, interpretation later (if at all); but then went further. Science had to be democratic through and through. The multiple working hypothesis method enshrined these egalitarian motives in the way scientists did their everyday work. America prided itself on its pragmatic, no-nonsense approach, and on hard work.

  Wegener’s book, by contrast, seemed to hark back to ‘the bad old days’, as they would have seemed, especially to American readers.

  ‘The first notion of the displacement of continents came to me in 1910 when, on studying a map of the world, I was impressed by the congruency of both sides of the Atlantic coasts,’ Wegener writes in his first chapter. He goes on: ‘This induced me to undertake a hasty analysis of the results of research … whereby such important confirmations were yielded that I was convinced of the fundamental correctness of my idea.’ In the English version of the fourth edition the words ‘hasty analysis’ are replaced by the less pejorative ‘cursory examination’ but the effect was the same.

  Wegener in full flight often reads a little like the letter of a madman: an obsessive with no education in the field, who suddenly undergoes a Damascene conversion that sets him off on a selective spree looking for confirmations of his Big Idea and rejecting anything else. After this strident and frank opening, which could hardly have been better calculated to annoy Americans, there is the small matter of the over-use of the sensitive word ‘proof’. Skerl used ‘prove’ and ‘proof’ indiscriminately to translate gentler German originals, which might have been better rendered as ‘demonstrate’ or ‘evidence’. Wegener’s apparent dogmatism, enhanced by Skerl, gave the impression of an inexperienced, auto-intoxicated ‘armchair’ scientist with an idée fixe. Other ‘working hypotheses’ were not given a fair and equal chance.

  Wegener’s book, in other words, was a polemic. He knew he was right. And what is more, when the criticisms began to rain down upon him, instead of meeting them halfway in an attempt to win his opponents over, Wegener merely became more and more adamant. In return, the trenchancy of his prose excused (and even encouraged) the brusquest of dismissals.

  As the eminent scholar Mott Greene has pointed out, much is made today of the fact that Wegener was not a ‘proper’ geophysicist and was therefore shunned as an interloper. This ‘fact’ arises, I believe, because quite a lot of the mud that was slung at him by his near contemporaries still sticks. The same goes, as we shall see, for the assertion by the same opponents that there was ‘no plausible mechanism’ for drift. Wegener’s opponents were not just vehement: many were implacable.

  Wegener was, in fact, no less a geophysicist than any of his contemporaries, he just happened to have written a book about the physics of the atmosphere and to hold a post in the only part of geophysics, meteorology, that had any money in it. Eventually he did move on to hold a chair in Graz, Austria, whose title had the word ‘geophysics’ in it. His writings, published in proper geophysical journals, show that he was fully conversant with all the relevant material, and his ideas were discussed, albeit rejected, by geophysicists everywhere. They could not ignore him. As Greene has written, if all this ‘does not identify Alfred Wegener as a geophysicist then nothing can and we can all retire to bedlam’.

  Cultural differences also play their part here. If the meaning of the word ‘science’ can be so completely different between the Anglo-Saxon world and everywhere else (where it means ‘organized knowledge’ about anything, including literature, for example), there is no hope of attaining worldwide agreement on the meaning of ‘geophysics’. In the 1920s the understanding in most languages of the term ‘geophysics’ as the physics o
f the ‘solid’ Earth had not yet come about, and it still hasn’t in Russian. Indeed, in that language the term ‘geophysics’ still is understood to embrace all Earth sciences.

  Cultural incongruities dogged Wegener. His PR skills were not good. His method of doing science was out of favour. The Great War had ended almost a decade before, but the mid-1920s were still not a good time to be German. Wegener himself also came with brandname difficulties. As the eminent historian of science Naomi Oreskes has pointed out in her brilliant and comprehensive textbook The Rejection of Continental Drift, to his geological readers the name Wegener sounded ‘eerily similar’ to the name of his eighteenth-century compatriot Werner.

  Abraham Gottlob Werner (1750–1817) was perhaps the archetypal grand theorist of an old school, and at that time one of the most blackened historical figures in the Anglo-Saxon panoply of scientific bad guys. He was a vivid example of European system-building folly: the proponent of a discredited Weltall theory who, being already slain, was only too readily re-slain by subsequent generations. He was, in fact, still as unfashionable as only the most recently fashionable can be. More subliminally yet, the name ‘Wegener’ even seemed to echo another megalomaniac, world-building German Romantic, Richard Wagner.

  Perhaps the final straw was the fact that Wegener’s book had been written by a man who had gained the leisure to flesh out its ideas while recovering from wounds sustained during his country’s recent assault upon the free, democratic world. In 1914 Wegener was drafted, and was shot in the arm during the assault on Belgium. Two weeks after his return to active service, he was shot again, this time in the neck, and his days of active duty were over. The fact that this objectionable theory had come to maturity in the mind of a man invalided from the hordes of the Boche was tactlessly given away in the author’s Introduction to the third and fourth editions. Drift seemed to pose as much a Teutonic threat as a tectonic one, with Wegener being described in print with such choice words as ‘forgetful’, ‘selective’, ‘unscientific’ and even ‘deranged’.