001 Wegener Fact File - nmb

Alfred Wegener

1880 – 1930

Alfred Wegener was born in Berlin in 1880, where his father was a minister who ran

an orphanage. From an early age he took an interest in Greenland, and always

walked, skated, and hiked as though training for an expedition. He studied in

Germany and Austria, receiving his PhD in astronomy. But no sooner did he finish

his dissertation than he dropped astronomy to study meteorology, the new science of

weather.

had once been fit together. He was not the first to notice this, but it was an idea that would never leave his

thoughts. In 1911, he published a textbook on the thermodynamics of atmosphere, but at the same time he

pursued his studies of the continents. He first spoke on the topic in January of 1912, where he put forth the

idea of "continental displacement" or what later was called continental drift. The year 1912 was busy for

Wegener: he got married (to the daughter of Germany's leading meteorologist) and he returned to Greenland,

making the longest crossing of the ice cap ever made on foot.

Though he served in World War I and was wounded twice, he published his ideas in 1915. They constituted

the first focused and rational argument for continental drift, but still they veered radically from the accepted

beliefs of the time. Some scientists supported him. Still more scientists opposed him -- including his father-

in-law, who seemed annoyed that Wegener had strayed from meteorology into the unknown territory of

Well after his death, and after World War II, Wegener's theories were vindicated by the work of Harry Hess

and others. In 1960 Hess proposed the mechanism of sea-floor spreading, which would explain how the

continents moved. Newly discovered exploration techniques were employed to prove this theory and

ultimately, the correctness of Wegener's chief idea as well.

Alfred Lothar Wegener: Moving continents

Perhaps Alfred Wegener's greatest contribution to the scientific world was his ability to weave seemingly

dissimilar, unrelated facts into a theory, which was remarkably visionary for the time. Wegener was one of

the first to realize that an understanding of how the Earth works required input and knowledge from all the

earth sciences.

Wegener's scientific vision sharpened in 1914 as he was recuperating in a military hospital from an injury

and Oceans) published in 1915.