Did Alfred Wegner Prove He's Not Crazy?

“One of the great themes of historical literature over the past five centuries has been the assessment of the European discovery of the Americas as one of the two greatest events in human history.” (2). A similar, better-known pronouncement was penned by Francisco Lopez de Gomara, Hernan Cortes’s private secretary

In the early 16th century, Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan named the largest ocean in the world ‘O Mar Pacífico’ meaning peaceful sea. What Magellan didn’t know is that his arrival would mark a fateful new era for the inhabitants of the pacific and forever disrupt whatever peace they had before. In “The Other One-Third of the Globe,” anthropologist Ben Finney explains the history the habitation of the Pacific islands. He looks at the complete human history of the islands, not just the colonial period, which was unusual but very refreshing.

Charles C. Mann is an American journalist and author. Along with being a three-time finalist for the National Magazine Award, Mann has also received many writing awards from the American Bar Association, the American Institute of Physics, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and the Lannan Foundation. He is also the author of national bestseller 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, which won the National Academies Communication Award for "Best Book of the Year." Mann's purpose for writing this book is to educate and inform people about the real situation of people before and after Columbus.

The Mayans were hardworking people who lived in Mesoamerica. A thousand years ago before the spanish arrived, the maya built a great civilization. What many seem to question is what was so remarkable about what this group did.The four criterias scale, genius, physical effort and significance will be examined to see which was actually remarkable. People today argue over which Mayan achievement was the greatest - the trade network, numbers, calendars, and city-buildings , however true to say is that the building cities was the achievement that set the group off to great contributions.

In the novel, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created, Charles C. Mann enlightens and captures how Columbus’s expeditions united the lands of Eurasia and America. It is a well-written and informational book that successfully displays much of the development and foundation of our present all from the European discovery of the new world. Charles C. Mann’s main objective with this book was to extend on the geographer, Alfred W Crosby’s explanation of “Ecological Imperialism.”

The plate tectonics theory was made by a German named Alfred Wegener. He stated that a single continent existed about 300 million years ago named Pangaea and that it split into two continents of Laurasia in the north and Gondwanaland in the south. Today’s continents were formed by further splitting of the two masses.

conquering of the Incas, and his help at discovering the great, big, blue of what we know as the Pacific

Previously, Columbus was the “person who found the Americas,” but that is historically incorrect. We celebrate Columbus day as if he was a hero who saved mankind but he did the exact opposite. Zinn explains how much the Native Americans suffered and their perspective during Columbus's “discovery” of the Bahamas. We learn that because of his discovery, everyone was able to benefit from it but we never learn specifically how his actions affected the Arawaks.

In trying to summarize this piece of writing, I have tried to talk about what stood out to me, all quotations used for emphasis are from The myth of the continents: A critique of metageography (University of California Press: 1997).

Andrew Wakefield is a former gastroenterologist and medical researcher who was discharged from his medical register in the UK, because of his dishonest research paper he released back in 1998, that analysed a possible link between measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine and the presence of autism and bowel disease (Godlee, F., et al, 2011). Wakefield's research generated a substantial scare for the MMR vaccine and MMR vaccination rates began to drop because parents were concerned about the risk of autism after vaccination (DeStefano, F., Chen, R.T., 1999). After the paper was published by the Lancet medical newspaper, other reviews were trying to repeat Wakefield's conclusions,

These scientists set out find the answer as to why the Maya civilization collapsed. This question is fairly popular and is often times answered by an extended drought, but they wanted to find geologic evidence of what the climate was like in the same time period hoping that there is an obvious link between the two. This question

“But you are rather waiting to hear from me how it occurred to me to venture to conceive any motion of the earth, against the traditional opinion of astronomers and almost against common sense…” (39).

This is a great example of how discoveries depended on indigenous people and where they were

The first theory was that land bridges connected all of the continents, being in the same spot through all of time, the land bridges would’ve gotten covered by water and become part of the ocean.

A supercontinent, known as Pangea, was formed by the aggregation of all the world’s landmasses in the Late Triassic-Early Jurassic. This concept of a supercontinent was originally proposed by Alfred Wegener (Wegener, 1915). He suggested that all continents assembled into a single supercontinent, approximately 300 million years ago, and then according to the theory of plate tectonics, began to break apart 175 million years ago (Rogers et al., 2004) Immense geologic and geophysical evidence have been presented, by Wegener and others, to support this theory for the Late Triassic-Early Jurassic. However when analyzing the paleomagnetic data for the Late Paleozoic time, inconsistencies are present which suggest a very different Pangea construction. These inconsistencies are seen in Late Paleozoic paleomagnetic data apparent polar wander paths (APWPs) for Laurussia and Gondwana. To fit Wegner’s Pangea reconstruction, the APWPs suggest a substantial crustal overlap and shearing (Domeier et al., 2012). This paper looks to review proposed alternative reconstructions for Pangea, using paleomagnetic data as the quantifiable method for determining the supercontinent’s location.