Formation of the mainland and the ocean

Author: Alfred Wegener
Publisher:
Publish Date: 1997-04-01
Features: In 1915, the author published his book The Origin of Continents and Oceans. Although the tides of war were raging, the book caused an extraordinary stir in the scientific community. As everyone knows, it initially did not receive comforting approval or recognition and was even met with expected and extremely rough opposition from certain perspectives. Until recently, people still tried to explain both mountains and the broad continental shelves rising from the deep seabed using an old, metaphorically described as an apple drying up, concept that was clearly intuitive. This concept held that the Earth was gradually cooling and contracting, with the interior contracting more severely than the exterior. Of course, this was difficult to prove. The outer shell kept expanding, thus creating a universal and persistent horizontal "dome pressure," which led to the formation of wrinkles (folded mountains). However, to also explain the continental plates, it was necessary to assume that the dome pressure could temporarily prevent the upper layers from contracting along with the core until a certain limit was exceeded, at which point a relatively sudden subsidence of larger plates would occur, forming a "horst" in one place while adjacent plates had already "sunk."