To promote a wider interest in the science of geology through organised lectures, field excursions and social activities.
To provide a link between the amateur, the student, the teacher and the professional geologist.
To foster interest in geological sites within the area with a view to their study and wise conservation.
To establish and maintain good relations with organisations that have common interests.

Wegener's Jigsaw

by

Clare Dudman

Sceptre, London, 2003, ISBN 0 340 82304 6

Clare Dudman’s book is a fictionalised life of Alfred Wegener. Geologists know him as the father of continental drift - if they know of him at all - but he was much more than this. For much of his life he was a meteorologist and this took him to Greenland in the early years of the last century. He seems to have fallen in love with the place and it was there that he was to die in the 1930’s.

Wegener was a radical thinker in every subject he took an interest in and was not one to be deterred by the conventional thinking of the subject. Therefore, inevitably, he became embroiled in disputes with the academic establishment. It is interesting to hear the abuse to which he was subjected. He was considered an outsider who was working on things he did not really understand. He should be quiet and let the professionals get on with the real science.

But in the end he was right and they were wrong. He made many mistakes but his concept of drifting continents explained the earth better than tales of land bridges and foundered continents.

The book is written as Wegener’s stream of consciousness and may not be to a hard-bitten geologists taste, but it does give some insight into how his mind may have worked. And it covers all of his varied and fascinating life. It is by no means just a catalogue of his doings!