Force for Drifting

The Driving Force Behind Continental Drift

Wegener knew that proposing continents had moved was one thing — explaining what moved them was another. He suggested two forces that, in his view, could push continents across the Earth's surface: the pole-fleeing force and the tidal force. Both were tied to processes we can observe today, but Wegener argued they needed enormous spans of time — many millions of years — to produce the drift he described.

The Pole-Fleeing Force

The first force, the pole-fleeing force (also called the polar-fleeing force), arises from the rotation of the Earth. To understand it, recall that the Earth is not a perfect sphere. It has a bulge at the equator — the planet is slightly flattened at the poles and wider around the middle. This equatorial bulge is itself a direct result of the Earth's rotation: the spinning motion pushes mass outward, away from the axis of rotation.

Wegener's reasoning was that this same rotational effect would create a force that tends to pull or push landmasses away from the poles and toward the equator. Hence the name — continents were being "fled" from the poles. The force was weak, but Wegener believed that given enough time, it could gradually shift entire continents.

The Tidal Force

The second force Wegener proposed was the tidal force, caused by the gravitational attraction of the Moon and the Sun. These bodies pull on the Earth's oceans, and their combined pull generates the daily rise and fall of tides in oceanic waters. Wegener extended this idea: if the Moon and Sun could pull the ocean waters, they could also, over long periods, exert a dragging effect on the continental masses themselves. This tidal pull, he argued, could slowly push the continents westward.

Why the Scientific Community Rejected These Forces

Wegener was aware that neither force was strong. His defence was that these forces would become effective when applied over many million years — a slow, cumulative effect rather than a sudden shove. But this argument did not convince his contemporaries. …