Select the correct text in the passage.
Read the sentence below.
"Although his research was thorough, Wegener's ideas were highly radical and met with little or no acceptance."
Which sentence in the passage supports this claim?
Do You Catch My Drift?
Modern scientists believe that all of Earth's continents were once part of one giant continent. Over time, this continent broke into several pieces and moved apart. This process, known as "continental drift," is far from over.
The belief that Earth's continents are moving is not new. In the early seventeenth century, many scientists observed startling similarities between the shorelines of eastern South America and western Africa, but they never imagined that the two continents had at one time been connected. These observations, while interesting, did little more than prompt conversation among scientists and philosophers.
Serious attention was finally given to the similarities between the African and South American shorelines in the early twentieth century. In 1912, Dr. Alfred Wegener suggested that all seven of the major continents had originally been united as a single supercontinent named Pangaea, which means "all land" in Greek. According to Wegener, this supercontinent separated into many smaller continents that have been moving ever since.
Wegener supported his bold claims by collecting information from the top archaeologists, geographers, and geologists of his day. He developed extremely detailed maps to demonstrate the breakup of Pangaea and illustrate the movements of the continents to their modern-day locations. Although his research was thorough, Wegener's ideas were highly radical and met with little or no acceptance.
The opposition to Wegener's ideas stemmed from a long history of scientific tradition. Scientists held firm to their belief that the continents were permanent fixtures on Earth's surface. Without irrefutable evidence, they were unwilling to drop their existing views and adopt Wegener's new, controversial views.
In 1928, a committee of geologists met to discuss the hypothesis of continental drift. "What type of force is strong enough to move continents?" the geologists asked. Wegener could not give them an answer, so the geologists rejected his hypothesis.
A handful of scientists, including Wegener, refused to give up, and continued their work on the rejected hypothesis. These scientists continued to discover reasonable scientific evidence to support their views, but the discovery of a continent-driving force eluded them for nearly 30 years.
Finally, in the 1960s, long after Wegener's death, research on Earth's ocean floors provided the crucial evidence to support the hypothesis of continental drift. In 1962, Harry Hess, a geology professor at Princeton University, published a paper outlining a process he called "sea-floor spreading." Hess proposed that continents do not move by themselves, but rather ride atop large plates of Earth that are slowly but constantly moving. After much review, Hess's research was accepted by a majority of the scientific community. His research provided a much-needed missing piece to the puzzle Dr. Wegener started years earlier.
Since the 1960s, scientists have changed their beliefs to follow those set forth by Dr. Alfred Wegener. They have a much clearer picture today of the movements of the continents. Although they cannot know for certain where the continents are headed, they can keep us aware of the changes as they happen. One thing is guaranteed: we are going on a long ride, whether we like it or not!