World of Scientific Discovery on Alfred L. Wegener
Alfred Wegener is remembered as one of the world's foremost earth scientists for his idea that 200 million years ago all seven continents were part of a singular land mass that broke apart -- the theory of continental drift. Born in Berlin, Germany, Wegener earned a Ph.D. in astronomy at the University of Berlin in 1905. In 1906 he and his brother Kurt, by making a balloon flight of 52 hours, set a new world record, easily breaking the previous record of 35 hours. Wegener also made the first scientific traverse of Greenland's ice cap during his first expedition there.
In 1906 Wegener joined a Danish expedition to Greenland as a meteorologist to study arctic climatology. After his return in 1908, he became interested in the movement of landmasses. Wegener noticed that the eastern coast of South America and the western coast of Africa appear on maps and globes as if they were two pieces of a puzzle. He became better acquainted with the Earth sciences, and pursued research in a diverse range of related scientific fields -- meteorology, climatology, glaciology, astronomy, geophysics, and geology. This research enabled him to cite similarities in rock types of the two continents, and he obtained fossil evidence to support his theory. In 1910, Wegener studied nineteenth century longitude records and compared them with a longitude survey performed during the Danish expedition. This suggested that Greenland was moving westward at a rate perhaps 30 feet or more (9 m) per year. In 1912, based on this record of movement (which was later proved to be incorrect), Wegener published a two-part paper on his research. It presented his hypothesis that all of the continents had once been joined together in a single landmass. He named this supercontinent Pangaea or "all lands". Wegener speculated that it probably took a couple hundred million years for the components of Pangaea to break up and drift apart to their current positions. In 1915 Wegener published his ideas as a 94-page book, entitled The Origin of Continents and Oceans. A second, expanded edition came out in 1920, followed by a third in 1922. This edition was published in English, French, Russian, and Spanish and received wide attention from Earth scientists throughout Europe and the United States. A fourth edition, containing more of Wegener's responses to critics' comments, was published in 1929. His brother Kurt published a fifth and final edition in 1936, after Alfred's death.
Despite the temporary sensation caused by Wegener's continental drift theory during the early 1920s, and while he had a number of respected supporters, the majority of Earth scientists felt that his theory left too many problems unaddressed or unresolved, including a driving mechanism. Not until the early 1960s when the theory of seafloor spreading was introduced by Harry Hammond Hess did Wegener's ideas achieve some degree of respect among Earth scientists as a precursor of plate tectonics theory. In retrospect, the criticisms of Wegener's ideas were largely valid -- while he got some things right, many more were wrong.
In spite of his failed theory, Wegener's career was a fairly prestigious one. From 1908 to 1912, Wegener taught as a lecturer and demonstrator of meterology and astronomy at Marburg. He embarked on his second Greenland expedition from 1912 to 1913. In 1914 when World War I began, Wegener was called to duty as an officer in the German army. He was wounded twice but served in the army until the war ended in 1919. He then worked as Director of the Meteorological Department of the Marine Observatory in Hamburg from 1919 to 1924 and as a professor of meteorology and geophysics at the University of Graz in Austria from 1924 to 1930. He continued to study the Arctic island of Greenland until his death on a fourth expedition to the island.
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