Wegener deduced, correctly, that oceans are underlain by dense rocks and continents by light rocks, but he erred in arguing that the continents were rafts floating about in the dense material. He died in 1930 on the Greenland ice cap, victim of his own inept planning and execution of a middle-scale replay of Robert F. Scott's second Antarctic expedition, complete with ponies and untested vehicles.
Wegener was dismissed as a presumptive amateur by most geologists and geophysicists of his time. Of the few who supported the better of his conclusions, several developed powerful evidence for the reality of continental drift. By 1937, with the publication of Our Wandering Continents by Alexander DuToit of South Africa, that reality was effectively proved even though most geoscientists remained unaware. Not until the 1960s—when paleomagnetic indicators of past latitudes were found to be compatible with geologic ones and when geophysical studies of the ocean ...
