Alfred Wegener
Alfred Lothar Wegener was a
German interdisciplinary scientist, who became famous for his theory of continental drift.
Encyclopedia
Alfred Lothar Wegener was a
German interdisciplinary scientist, who became famous for his theory of continental drift.
Career
Wegener had early training in
astronomy . He became interested in the new discipline of
meteorology and as a record-holding
balloonist himself, pioneered the use of
weather balloons to track air masses. His lectures became a standard textbook in meteorology,
The Thermodynamics of the Atmosphere. Wegener was part of several expeditions to
Greenland to study polar air circulation, when the existence of a
jet stream itself was highly controversial. He died there of exposure.
Continental Drift
Browsing the library at the
University of Marburg, where he was teaching in 1911, Wegener was struck by the occurrence of identical
fossils in geological strata that are now separated by
oceans. The accepted explanations or theories at the time posited land bridges to explain away these anomalies. But Wegener was increasingly convinced that the continents themselves had shifted away from a primal single massive supercontinent, which drifted apart about 200 million years ago, to judge from the fossil evidence.
From 1912 he publicly advocated his theory of "continental drift", arguing that the
continents on both sides of the
Atlantic Ocean were drifting apart.
In 1915, in
The Origin of Continents and Oceans , Wegener published the theory that there had once been a giant supercontinent, which, in later editions, he named "
Pangaea" and drew together evidence from various fields. Expanded editions during the
1920s presented the accumulating evidence. The last edition, just before his untimely death, revealed the significant observation that shallower oceans were geologically younger.
Reaction
The one American edition, published in 1924, provoked such hostility that it was not revised. Many geologists focused on a lack of a demonstrable mechanism and rejected and ridiculed Wegener for his ideas, noting that he could not explain how continents were able to move. The theory received support through the controversial years from
South African geologist Alexander Du Toit as well as from Arthur Holmes. Only after the mid-
20th century discovery of
seafloor spreading did Wegener receive credit, as an early developer of the theory of
plate tectonics. It took more than 50 years before adequate evidence was acquired and presented to convince mainstream geologists to acknowledge that the continents were actually in motion; and the fit between the coasts of
Africa and
South America was more than just illusionary. Nevertheless, Wegener's assumed drift rate was ten to a hundred times faster than we now know to be true, and this unreasonable estimate must have contributed to the resistance to his ideas. To quote course materials from Prof. Michael Jordan of
Texas A&M University, , " Also, our measurements show the rates of plate movements to be at most about 1/10 to 1/100 of what Wegener had proposed."
Awards and honors
The Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in
Bremerhaven, Germany, established in 1980, honours his name. The Wegener
impact craters on both
Mars and the
Moon, as well as the
asteroid 29227 Wegener, are named after him.
See also
See also:
External links
