Animated Life‘s Paper Puppets Show How the Arctic Inspired Pangea

The in style instalment of Animated Life , a series of invigoration by Flora Lichtman and Sharon Shattuck chronicling major scientific discoveries from inspiration to adoption , is about Alfred Wegener and his then - controversial estimate about Pangea and continental purport .

In this paper - puppet docudrama short , Lichtman and Shattuck smoothen a light on three themes of discovery . First , that foreigner can give a lot . As they write inThe New York Times :

In this film , we lionise Alfred Wegener , who studied uranology , worked as an atmospheric physicist , and seemed happiest exploring Greenland on grueling multiyear expeditions . How did someone with no grooming in geology follow up with a possibility that is now key to solid ground skill ? The historian Mott Greene , author of the upcoming Good Book “ Alfred Wegener : Science , Exploration and the Theory of Continental Drift , ” remind us that many heavy discoveries in skill were made by outsiders to a given scientific field of operations . Louis Pasteur was a crystallographer ; Darwin , a geologist .

secondly , that defence is by no substance a warranty . Wegener ’s approximation were initially run into with resistance by the fields that he was an foreigner in . It was n’t until after his death that plate tectonics took off and justify his reflection .

And third , that even a major contributor can be wrong . The scant points out that Wegener was really only right that continents were moving . He was wrong about how it happened and about how fast it was occurring . And yet , if he had n’t put his conception of continental impulsion into the world , it may have take much longer for scientists to investigate just how the continents were moving .

As usual , the animation is magic and educational .

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