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.
Wegener experimented with kites and balloons, and with his brother
Kurt set a world record in an international balloon contest, flying 52
hours straight. That was in 1906, the year he made his first
expedition to Greenland. He went as the official meteorologist on a
two-year Danish expedition. When he returned he took up teaching
meteorology at the University of Marburg, where he was a very popular
lecturer.
In 1910, Wegener noticed the matching coastlines of the Atlantic
continents -- they looked on maps like they 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 geophysics. The established reputation of many of his
detractors probably gave more weight to their criticisms than was
merited. Wegener often complained of their narrow-mindedness.
In 1926 Wegener was finally offered a professorship in meteorology.
In 1930 he sailed from Denmark as the leader of a major expedition to
Greenland -- his fourth and last. He celebrated his fiftieth birthday
on November 1, but shortly afterwards the team got separated, and he
was lost in a blizzard. His body was found halfway between the two
camps.
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 exporation techniques were employed to prove this
theory and ultimately, the correctness of Wegener's chief idea as
well.
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