Frank Bursley Taylor
Geologist, Deceased Person
1860 – 1938
Who was Frank Bursley Taylor?
Frank Bursley Taylor was an American geologist, the son of a lawyer in Fort Wayne, Indiana. He was a Harvard dropout who studied privately financed in large part by his wealthy father. He became a specialist in the glacial geology of the Great Lakes, and proposed to the Geological Society of America on December 29, 1908 that the continents moved on the Earth's surface, that a shallow region in the Atlantic marks where Africa and South America were once joined, and that the collisions of continents could uplift mountains. His ideas were based on his studies on mountain ranges as the Andes, Rockies, Alps and Himalayas. He concluded that these mountains could have been formed only as a result of titanic lateral pressures that thrust the earth's surface upward. His theory was either ignored or opposed by other scientists of his time.
Frank Bursley Taylor's ideas about continental drift were independently discovered by Alfred Wegener in Germany three years later, on January 1912, but even with Wegener's extensive extra research the idea did not achieve acceptance until the 1960s when a vast weight of evidence had accrued via Harry Hess, Fred Vine and Drummond Matthews.
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