November 1 is reserved to Alfred Wegener
Today is the birthday of Alfred Wegener, who was born in Berlin, Germany in 1880. He earned a PhD in astronomy from the University of Berlin in 1905. Several years later he began researching the possibility that Earth's continents had once fit together into one supercontinent.
Other scientists had proposed the idea, noting how South America and Africa look like they are adjoining puzzle pieces. Those scientists suspected that part of the supercontinent had sunk under water. But Wegener proposed that the land masses had actually shifted, a mechanism he called "die Verschiebung der Kontinente"—continental displacement, or, more familiarly, continental drift.
Wegener also devised the name Pangaea for the supercontinent. Similar-looking fossils found in the Americas and Africa from hundreds of millions of years ago backed his theory. Although his ideas wouldn't catch on for decades, the theory of plate tectonics in the 1960s proved Wegener largely correct.
Bio:
http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/history/wegener.html
Plate Tectonics: The Rocky History of an Idea
http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/geology/techist.html
#history #platetectonics #alfredwegener
Pangaea - it's all Greek to me.
ReplyDeleteWell done Herr Wegener, helping the human species out of the dark ages
ReplyDeleteOne of those theories that it's surprising that they didn't come earlier, well ... as soon as we had accurate maps of continents.
ReplyDelete