Fortunately, the scientific community began to change their minds in the 1950's. A geologist named Harry Hess decided to use new sonar technology on his ship to collect data about the topography of the ocean floor. When analyzing the data, he found the ocean floor to contain mountain ranges, trenches, guyots, and flat plains. Not long afterward, two other scientists found a huge, scar-like rift and ridge running down the Atlantic Ocean. This inspired Hess to reexamine his original data, and eventually form the conclusion that hot magma rises to the surface at the rift and cools to form new land. This new land slowly forces older land further apart, essentially making the attached continents move. Hess published his findings as strong support for Wegener's theory. The movement of the divergent boundary explained many other features on the ocean floor, such as guyots as once volcanic mountains or islands that had been pushed from their source of magma and slowly eroded by the ocean.

Plate Tectonics is a theory, meaning it has not been proven as 100% fact. The purpose of the theory is to explain the causes of geological events, such as earthquakes and volcanoes, and hypothesize about the reasons behind land features, such as mountain ranges and the positions of continents.

Today, Wegener's theory is the basis of the widely accepted Plate Tectonics theory. Wegener's broken crust became tectonic plates, the coastlines of most continents were found to be along plate boundaries, and the interactions between plates became an investigation into other geological events. Later, in the 1960's, more evidence to support the theory was found on the ocean floor. Scientists took rock samples from the rift (divergent boundary) and found a pattern. Examining the iron within the rocks on the ocean floor near the divergent rift, scientist found that they were magnetically oriented in an alternating pattern, clearly proving the movement of rock away from the boundary. This is called Magnetic Striping.