Free Supercontinent: Ten Billion Years in the Life of Our Planet by Ted Nield Page B

Nor did it help much in explaining why the southern continents had all been glaciated at more or less the same time, and on opposite sides of the (present) Equator.
    The great British geophysicist Arthur Holmes, an early convert to continental drift, who first suggested convection in the Earth’s mantle as a plausible mechanism for it as early as the 1920s, wrote in the 1965 edition of his great book Principles of Physical Geology:
    The … climatic dilemma could only be resolved by realising that the deep-rooted ‘common sense’ belief in the fixity of the continents relative to each other … was now in direct conflict with the evidence of the chief witness – the Earth herself. In other words … continental drift had to be taken seriously. But mathematical physicists declared [it] to be impossible and most geologists accepted their verdict, forgetting that their first loyalty was to the Earth and not to books written about the Earth.
     
    To see a thing, first you must believe it to be possible. As it was for the Blanford brothers with their bold interpretation of the Talchir boulder bed, the simple act of believing your eyes is very often an act of considerable mental courage. The same went for the faunal zones and the Wallace line. The simplest explanation, such as William of Occam always urges upon scientists, was that the continents had moved sideways across the surface of the Earth. But in the late nineteenth century (and for much of the twentieth) that remained too wild a surmise to be accepted.  
    Nevertheless, after all this confusion and speculation about a lost continent that had never actually existed, the first genuine lost continent to be freed from oblivion by the human mind was emerging into the gaze of a new breed of time traveller. A vanished geography, that had begun its disappearing act 250 million years ago, was backing slowly into the light.

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LAND OF THE GONDS
     
     
    The hills are shadows, and they flow
From form to form, and nothing stands;
They melt like mist, the solid lands,
Like clouds they shape themselves and go.
    ALFRED TENNYSON, IN MEMORIAM
     
    Fixed to number five, at the end of the street nearest to Angel tube station in Islington, north London, is a rectangular green plaque put there by the Geological Society of London, announcing it as the birthplace of Eduard Suess (1831–1914), ‘Statesman and Geologist’. Sadly, today almost nobody remembers who Eduard Suess was. But he was recognized in his lifetime as one of the greatest scientists of the nineteenth century; one who, in the course of a long and busy life, manned the barricades in a revolution; brought a new fresh water supply from the Alps to another great European capital, Vienna; and tamed that city’s floods. He also wrote a wholly remarkable book which made him the first human being to conceive of a long-vanished giant landmass uniting the southern continents. This land still bears the name he gave it: ‘Gondwanaland’.
    Suess spent most of his student life in Vienna; but three years after he settled there the city was caught in the liberal revolution that swept Europe in 1848, the momentous year in which Karl Marx published The Communist Manifesto. Suess might have come from a bourgeois mercantile background but he didn’t let it hold him back; and for all his politeness to his English friends, he was no Englishman. He was a young, liberal activist mingling with others who, like him, were soon to take a decisive role in their country’s affairs, and who were of an age (and disposition) to man barricades. Suess learnt, in 1848, that the world could change, suddenly and permanently. What is more, sudden revolutions were not only possible: they could do you good. Not that it did him much good at first.
    Like many things revolutionary, it started in France. The 1848 Paris revolution, which eventually led to the short-lived Second Republic, caused a run on the Vienna stock market. There was revolution in