beagle-impossible5 - The Monday Morning Memo

And I know if I’ll only be true

To this glorious quest

That my heart will lie peaceful and calm

When I’m laid to my rest

“Continental drift: there’s someone who looked at the shape of South America and the shape of Africa on a map and said, ‘Wait, that looks like it fits. But there’s a whole ocean between them. Did these landmasses once connect? Let’s test this.’

Well, what might you do?

You’ll say, ‘If they were once connected, might there be fossils in common on both shores, even though there’s an ocean between them?’

So you look. The fossils match! And other things start matching.

“But wait a minute, how the hell is land going to move on a solid surface?”

No one had any idea about this, so it just sort of stayed there, on the shelf, because even though this was intriguing evidence, it wasn’t enough to convince everybody.

And so what happens after the Second World War? Well, we’re mapping the bottom of the Atlantic, so the subs know where to hide and where to go. And in the center of the Atlantic, there’s a ridge.

‘Oh my gosh! There’s a split! It’s separating in the middle of the Atlantic!’

Once that was declassified and published, we had the mechanism, and all the data fit.”

- Neil deGrasse Tyson

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