Alfred Wegener

Alfred Wegener (1880-1930), German meteorologist and geophysicist, noted chiefly for advocating the theory of continental drift at a time when the technological means for proving the theory had not yet been developed. He was born on November 1, 1880, in Berlin, where his father, a church minister, ran an orphanage. In 1904 he received his Ph.D. in astronomy from the University of Berlin, but his real interest lay in geophysics and the relatively new field of climatology. He was also intensely interested in Greenland, making his first expedition there in 1906. He pioneered the use of balloons to track polar air circulation. On his return from Greenland, he lectured on meteorology at the University of Marburg.

In 1910 Wegener began to study the evidence of similar fossils of animals and plants found at opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean. He did not accept the generally held explanation that this was due to land bridges that had once connected the continents. In 1911 he published a textbook on the thermodynamics of the atmosphere, but he continued his studies of the continents. He observed a close geographical fit between the coastlines of Africa and South America. Geological and fossil evidence persuaded him that the continents had drifted apart, in what he called, in 1912, “continental displacement”, but what later became known as continental drift (see Geology). His theory, published in 1915 in The Origins of Continents and Oceans (trans. 1924), was received by the academic community with scathing hostility (previously, the American F. B. Taylor had published a little-noticed speculative paper on continental drift). Wegener suggested that an ancestral “supercontinent” had begun breaking up approximately 200 million years ago into a northern portion, which he called Laurasia, and a southern portion, named Gondwana by the Austrian geologist Eduard Suess. Wegener’s theories were only gradually accepted (long after his death) from the 1950s onward by the modified theories of plate tectonics and seafloor spreading.

In 1914, during World War I, Wegener was conscripted into the German Army. After having been wounded, he served out the war in the army weather forecasting service. In 1924 he was appointed to a special professorship in meteorology and geophysics at the University of Graz, Austria. In 1930 he died in a blizzard during his fourth expedition to Greenland, a day or two after his 50th birthday.