Download Quote:

Ms. Risi’s NoodleTools Notecard
Title: Wegener’s better idea on mountains
Source Citation:
Hughes, Patrick. "The Meteorologist Who Started a Revolution. (German Alfred Wegener)(The First Fifty Years)." Weatherwise , vol.
38, no. 4, 11 Jan. 1998. eLibrary ,
elibrary.bigchalk.com/elibweb/elib/do/document?urn=urn:bigchalk:US%3BBCLib%3Bdocument%3B28673478. Accessed 30 Nov.
2016.
Quote:
Wegener also offered a more plausible explanation for mountain ranges.
According to the cooling, contracting-Earth theory (???), they formed on the
earth's crust as wrinkles form on the skin of a drying apple. If this were so,
however, they should be spread evenly over the earth; instead mountain ranges
occur in narrow bands, usually at the edge of a continent. Wegener said they
formed when the edge of a drifting continent crumpled and folded as when
India hit Asia and formed the Himalayas .
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Paraphrase:
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Alfred Wegener - he's the guy who came up with Plate Tectonics Theory - people
thought he was crazy
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AW had a new and better explanation of mountains
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noticed - mountains are seen in "bands" - kind of like connected rows, ranges? most often at the edge of continents
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concluded: when continents move, they crash into each other
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and then...
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the Earth crunches up at the boundaries into mountain ranges
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example: India hits Asia = the Himalayas
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My Ideas:
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
This excerpt is from an article about Alfred Wegener , the scientist who came up with Plate Tectonics
Theory, which at the time was considered completely insane.
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He came up with the idea that the continents used to be one giant continent that he called PANGEA. He
figured it out partly by realizing that the continents look like pieces of a puzzle that sort of fit together.
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This paragraph talks about how Wegener used his observations about mountains in his work on Plate
Tectonics.
I took notes on this because...
it helped me understand how Wegener came up with this crazy theory about continents moving around and
crashing into each other to make mountains. And, how he used his observations about mountains to form
Plate Tectonic Theory.
It is important because…
to understand Plate Tectonic Theory, you have to know how the whole idea came up in this scientist's brilliant
mind - the connections he made as a scientist - how he saw things that other scientists were not seeing. It also
helps me understand how mountains are formed.
I am going to use this information in my essay like this…
to show how Wegener thought about and used what he saw and concluded about mountain ranges to explain
what happens when the continents move
I am still confused about…
whether mountains are only at the edge of continents, as this paragraph says. Aren't mountains also in the
middle of continents?
Also, what is the cooling, contracting Earth theory ?
Vocabulary I had to look up with the definitions:
plausible: reasonable, believable
bands: a stripe or elongated area of a different color, texture, or composition than its surroundings.
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