Comment on xkcd #3159: Continents

rImITywR@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

• nialv7@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Of course people hypothesized continents have drifted, but that wasn’t widely accepted until a mechanism of how that could have happened was proposed. I don’t think xkcd was suggesting that nobody had the idea of continental drift before 1967, just that it wasn’t the consensus.

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• dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  And we gained a pretty damn good idea during World War 2 when we were trying to map parts of the ocean floor for submarine warfare purposes, and discovered the mid ocean fault points. Especially the Mariana Trench, which is spang in the middle of the Atlantic between the jigsaw puzzle coastlines of Africa and South America.

  Needless to say we weren’t to keen to blab to our enemies just how much we knew about the seafloor, and neither were they. What with submarine warfare being a Big Deal in the cold war following, and all.

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  • spizzat2@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Mariana Trench, which is spang in the middle of the Atlantic between the jigsaw puzzle coastlines of Africa and South America.

    Maybe I’m not understanding you, but the Mariana Trench is in the Pacific Ocean.

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    • dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      No, I’m wrong. It’s the Mid-Atlantic ridge.

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    • Klear@quokk.au ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      Yeah, it drifted there since the 40s.

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      • ivanafterall@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

        Some people just don’t watch the news. 🙄 Marianas Trench relocated off the coast of North Carolina back in like 2020.

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  • merc@sh.itjust.works ⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    I have to believe that as soon as there were accurate maps of South America’s east coast and Africa’s west coast, someone must have looked at them and said – you know, I bet those two were joined at some point in the past.

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• shalafi@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  According to A Short History of Nearly Everything, plate tectonics is a very new idea, within my lifetime new. I forget the numbers, but the author states that by the 1980s a large minority of geologists still didn’t believe in it.

  He prefaces this with stories of naturalists being puzzled over the age of the Earth. They couldn’t explain what they had observed if the Earth was only 10s of millions of years old.

  Awesome book BTW. It’s a history of science, what we knew and when and how we figured it out.

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  • rImITywR@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Yes, plate tectonics is recent. But it explains how continents move. The comics says that before 1967, no thought they moved at all. Which is false.

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    • LifeInMultipleChoice@lemmy.world ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Yeah but dinosaurs didn’t exist because the Bible only kinda mentions them.

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  • P1nkman@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Bill Brysons books are amazing! Since you like Short History,I highly recommend At Home, also by Bryson.

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    • shalafi@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      Just found an epub!

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    • ripcord@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      I take everything he says with a grain of salt, though.

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      • SaraTonin@lemmy.world ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        This is wise when reading or hearing anything

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      • shalafi@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

        Yep. I later found inaccuracies in A Short History of Nearly Everything. Nothing that changed much, but still, I wasn’t nitpicking either.

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• diphthong@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  It is correct about when plate tectonics theory became mainstream consensus. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plate_Tectonics_Revolution

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  • rImITywR@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Yes, plate tectonics is recent. But it explains how continents move. The comics says that before 1967, no thought they moved at all. Which is false.

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• SCmSTR@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Breathe*

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