Alfred Wegener

Alfred Wegener proposed "continental drift" theory in 1912 and developed it extensively for nearly twenty years. His book on the subject, "The Origin of Continents and Oceans", went through four editions and was the focus of an international controversy in his lifetime and for some years after his death.

Wegener's basic idea was that many problems and puzzles of the earth's history could be solved if one supposed that the continents moved laterally rather than supposing that they remained fixed in place. Wegener worked over many years to show how such continental movements were plausible and how they worked, using evidence and results from geology, geodesy, geophysics, palontology, climatology and paleogeography.

Although he was the author of a "geological theory", he was not a geologist. He was trained as an astronomer and pursued a career in atmospheric physics. When he proposed the theory of continental displacements (1912), he was 31 years old and an instructor of physics and astronomy at the University of Marburg, Germany. In 1906, he and his broter had set a world record for time aloft in a free balloon : fifty-two hours. Between 1906 - 1908 he had taken part in a highly publicized expedition to explore the coast of northeast Greenland. He was also known to the circle of meteorologists and atmospheric physicsists in Germany as the author of a textbook, "Thermodynamics of the Atmosphere" (1911). He also wrote a number scientific papers on atmospheric layering.