Alfred Wegener

Alfred Wegener (1880-1930), German meteorologist, noted chiefly for advocating the theory of continental drift at a time when the technological means for proving the theory had not yet been developed. Wegener served as professor of meteorology at Graz University from 1924 to 1930. Drawing on several lines of evidence, he rejuvenated the idea that all the continents were once joined as one landmass, which he named Pangaea. He further proposed that this ancestral supercontinent had begun breaking up approximately 200 million years earlier into a northern portion, which he called Laurasia, and a southern portion, named Gondwanaland by the Austrian geologist Eduard Suess. Wegener's theories, described in The Origin of Continents and Oceans (1915; trans. 1924), did not receive scientific corroboration, however, until the 1960s when oceanographic research revealed the phenomenon known as seafloor spreading. Wegener died during an expedition to Greenland. See Plate Tectonics.