Alfred Wegener
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Alfred Lothar Wegener (Berlin, November 1, 1880 – Greenland, November 2 or 3, 1930) was a German interdisciplinary scientist and meteorologist, who became famous for his theory of continental drift.
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[edit] Career
Wegener had early training in astronomy (Ph.D., University of Berlin, 1904). He became interested in the new discipline of meteorology (he married the daughter of famous meteorologist and climatologist Wladimir Köppen) and as a record-holding balloonist himself, pioneered the use of weather balloons to track air masses. His lectures became a standard textbook in meteorology, The Thermodynamics of the Atmosphere. Wegener was part of several expeditions to Greenland to study polar air circulation, when the existence of a jet stream itself was highly controversial. On his last expedition, Alfred Wegener and his companion Rasmus Villumsen went missing in November 1930. Wegener's body was found on May 12, 1931. His suspected cause of death was heart failure through overexertion.
[edit] Continental drift
Browsing the library at the University of Marburg, where he was teaching in 1911, Wegener was struck by the occurrence of identical fossils in geological strata that are now separated by oceans. He then noticed that the continents on a globe fit together like a jigsaw. The accepted explanations or theories at the time posited land bridges to explain away these anomalies. But Wegener was increasingly convinced that the continents themselves had shifted away from a primal single massive supercontinent, which drifted apart about 200 million years ago, to judge from the fossil evidence.[1]
From 1912 he publicly advocated the theory of "continental drift", arguing that the continents on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean were drifting apart.
In 1915, in The Origin of Continents and Oceans (Die Entstehung der Kontinente und Ozeane), Wegener published the theory that there had once been a giant supercontinent, which, in later editions, he named "Pangaea" (meaning "All-Lands") and drew together evidence from various fields. Expanded editions during the 1920s presented the accumulating evidence. The last edition, just before his untimely death, revealed the significant observation that shallower oceans were geologically younger.
[edit] Theory of centrifugal force
Alfred Wegener also came up with a theory to explain continental drift, although it was in error. His theory of continental drift proposed that centrifugal force moved the heavy continents toward the equator as the Earth spun. He thought that inertia, from centrifugal movement combined with tidal drag on the continents (caused by the gravitation of the sun and moon) would account for continental drift
[edit] Reaction
In his work, Wegener presented a large amount of circumstantial evidence in support of continental drift, but he was unable to come up with a convincing mechanism. Thus, while his ideas attracted a few early supporters such as Alexander Du Toit from South Africa and Arthur Holmes in England, the hypothesis was generally met with skepticism. The one American edition of Wegener's work, published in 1924, was received so poorly that the American Association of Petroleum Geologists organized a symposium specifically in opposition to the continental drift hypothesis. By the 1930's, Wegener's geological work was almost universally dismissed by the scientific community and remained obscure for some thirty years.
In the 1950s and 1960s, several developments in geology, notably evidence of seafloor spreading in the form of symmetric magnetic anomalies around mid-ocean ridges, led to the rapid resurrection of the continental drift hypothesis and its direct descendant, the theory of plate tectonics. Alfred Wegener was quickly recognized as a founding father of one of the major scientific revolutions of the 20th century.
[edit] Awards and honors
The Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Bremerhaven, Germany, established in 1980, honours his name. The Wegener impact craters on both Mars and the Moon, as well as the asteroid 29227 Wegener, are named after him.[2]
[edit] Quotation
"Science is a social process. It happens on a time scale longer than a human life. If I die, someone takes my place. You die; someone takes your place. What's important is to get it done." -- Alfred Lothar Wegener, shortly before his death at age 50[citation needed].
[edit] See also
- continental drift
- Gondwana
- land bridge
- Laurasia
- Pangaea
- plate tectonics
- seafloor spreading
- supercontinent
[edit] References
- ^ http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/history/wegener.html Alfred Wegener (1880-1930)
- ^ http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sbdb.cgi?sstr=29227
[edit] External links
| Persondata | |
|---|---|
| NAME | Wegener, Alfred Lothar |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | |
| SHORT DESCRIPTION | Interdisciplinary scientist and creator of the theory of continental drift |
| DATE OF BIRTH | November 1, 1880 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Berlin, Germany |
| DATE OF DEATH | November 2 or 3, 1930 |
| PLACE OF DEATH | Greenland |
