Talk:Continental drip

Latest comment: 9 years ago by Solomonfromfinland in topic Validity of theory

map needed edit

Can someone add a geophysical map of the world? I couldn't find any clean ones without political borders on Wikimedia Commons. Nicole Sharp (talk) 09:30, 25 April 2013 (UTC)Reply

Validity of theory edit

It seems like the theory wasn't really taken seriously. This article suggests that it was thought of as a joke. Looking for "continental drift" in Google Scholar doesn't bring up much; there are some articles but I think they're supposed to refer to continental drift (OCR errors perhaps). ... discospinster talk 22:12, 25 April 2013 (UTC)Reply

Whether it is just a coincidence or not doesn't change the fact that the phenomenon exists on the contemporary globe though. Nicole Sharp (talk) 23:47, 26 April 2013 (UTC)Reply


The acclaimed and much cited paper "Fake Tectonics and Continental Drip" by John C. Holden was published in the Journal of Irreproducible Results, v. 22, no. 2 (July) 1976. Yes, the so-called theory is a scientific joke. Scientists do have a sense of humor, especially geologists. Jay Gregg (talk) 18:23, 21 November 2014 (UTC)Reply

I removed Category:Pseudoscience on the grounds that said epithet (a highly stigmatizing and often unfair one, IMO) was unjustified on the grounds that this article is about an apparent phenomenon, an empirical observation (consider the shapes of South America, Africa, Thailand, India, Korea, Spain, Italy, Sweden/Norway, Florida, etc.). Not true pseudoscience. True, there isn't a specific known mechanism that would cause it, but lack of a know mechanism (such as when Edward Jenner found that cowpox prevents smallpox) does not make an empirically validated phenomenon pseudoscience; indeed, rejecting the existence of a phenomenon, inspite of strong evidence for it, just because there is no known mechanism for it, is blatantly unscientific. Okay?--Solomonfromfinland (talk) 02:36, 30 January 2015 (UTC)Reply