Wegener, Alfred Lothar
[b. Berlin, Germany, November 1, 1880, d. Greenland, November 1930]Trained as an astronomer, but working mostly as a meteorologist, Wegener is primarily remembered for his contribution to geology, the theory of continental drift. He named and described Pangaea and provided cogent arguments as to how this supercontinent broke into today's separate continents about 200,000,000 years ago. Although Wegener was not the first to recognize the breakup and separation of continents, he was the most effective advocate for the idea.
Alfred Lothar Wegener
The German meteorologist, Arctic explorer, and geophysicist Alfred Lothar Wegener (1880-1930) is remembered for his theory of continental drift.Alfred Wegener son of an Evangelical preacher, was born in Berlin on Nov. 1, 1880. He attended university at Heidelberg, Innsbruck, and Berlin. He became interested in arctic climatology and joined the 1906-1908 Danish expedition to Greenland as meteorologist. He returned there in 1912-1913 and, wintering on a high glacier, completed studies begun on his first visit.
In 1908 Wegener settled at Marburg, lecturing there with enviable clarity on meteorology and astronomy. The next years were perhaps his most fruitful: he wrote up his Greenland material; produced his Thermodynamik der Atmosphäre (1911), a standard textbook which ran through several editions; and conceived his idea of continental drift. He saw active service in World War I.
Wegener was a scientific civil servant at the Meteorological Department of the Deutsche Seewarte in Hamburg (1919-1924) and professor of meteorology and geophysics at the University of Graz (1924-1930). There he drew together aspects of subjects hitherto considered disparate while planning for a two-winter expedition to Greenland, scheduled to begin in 1930. He made a preliminary visit in 1929. Early in November 1930, in attempting to cross Greenland from an ice-cap camp to the Kamarujuk base on the west coast, he lost his life.
Most of Wegener's life was spent in conventional meteorology, and his contributions both there and in polar exploration have been recognized. But Wegener is most widely remembered for his theory of continental drift. In 1910 he was struck by the congruity of the east and west Atlantic shorelines. This, coupled with his fortuitous reading of evidence indicative of a land bridge from Brazil to Africa, led him to examine the geologic and paleoclimatologic evidence for his rapidly burgeoning continental drift theory. He suggested that until Mesozoic times the light material of the earth's crust formed one continental block floating on the dense core, that relative movement has since occurred, and that the geographic poles have wandered. These views he published in 1912 and expanded into book form as Die Entstehung der Kontinente und Ozeane (1915; The Origins of Continents and Oceans, 1924). The theory first received adverse criticism and then interested discussion. Many objections were overcome in later editions of the work, but in seeking a mechanism for the movements, Wegener failed. Thus the theory was long discounted. Recent work based on new information has led to a general acceptance of the concept.
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Alfred Lothar Wegener
(born Nov. 1, 1880, Berlin, Ger. — died Nov. 1930, Greenland) German meteorologist and geophysicist. After earning a Ph.D. in astronomy (1905), he became interested in paleoclimatology and traveled to Greenland to research polar air circulation. He formulated the first complete statement of the continental drift hypothesis, which he presented in The Origin of Continents and Oceans (1915). His theory won some adherents, but by 1930 most geologists had rejected it because of the implausibility of his postulations for the driving force behind the continents' movement. It was resurrected in the 1960s as part of the theory of plate tectonics. Wegener died during his fourth expedition to Greenland.
For more information on Alfred Lothar Wegener, visit Britannica.com.Columbia Encyclopedia: Wegener, Alfred Lothar
(1880–1930, German geologist, meteorologist, and Arctic explorer. Early in his life, he was on the staff of the aeronautical observatory at Lindenberg; was a professor of geophysics and meteorology at Hamburg from 1919 to 1924; was professor of meteorology at the Univ. of Graz from 1924 to 1930; and went on four polar expeditions (1906–08, 1912–13, 1929, and 1930) to test his meteorological and geophysical theories. He is known for his theory of continental drift, set forth in his Die Entstehung der Kontinente und Ozeane (1915; tr. The Origin of Continents and Oceans, 1924). According to Wegener, the present continents on earth were originally one large landmass he called Pangaea that gradually separated and drifted apart. He argued that the continents were still in the process of change and are still altering. His evidence included the jigsaw lineup of certain continents including the coast of Brazil and Africa's Gulf of Guinea, and paleontological similarities on either side of the Atlantic Ocean. His ideas were supported by some, including A. L. Dutoit, but rejected by most scientists until the early 1960s when scientists found paleomagnetic evidence (see paleomagnetism) of continental drift. He is also known for his expeditions to Greenland (on the last of which he lost his life) to establish meteorological stations and to ascertain the thickness of the icecap and the rate of drift of Greenland.
Bibliography
See the account of his last expedition, Greenland Journey (ed. by E. Wegener and F. P. Loewe, tr. 1939); J. Georgi, Mid-Ice (tr. 1934).Wikipedia: Alfred Wegener
Born November 1, 1880
Berlin
Died November 2, 1930
Greenland
Nationality German
Fields meteorology
geologyAlfred Lothar Wegener (November 1, 1880 – November 2 or 3, 1930) was a German scientist, geologist and meteorologist. He was born in Berlin. He is most notable for his theory of continental drift (Kontinentalverschiebung), proposed in 1915, which hypothesized that the continents were slowly drifting around the Earth. However, at the time he was unable to demonstrate a mechanism for this movement; this combined with a lack of solid evidence meant that his hypothesis was not accepted until the 1950s, when numerous discoveries provided evidence of continental drift.[1]
Contents
1 Career
2 Continental drift
2.1 Theory of centrifugal force
2.2 Reaction
3 Awards and honors
4 See also
5 References
6 Further readingCareer
Alfred Wegener had early training in astronomy (Ph.D., University of Berlin, 1904). He became very 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, in Greenland, Alfred Wegener and his companion Rasmus Villumsen became lost in a blizzard and went missing in November 1930. Wegener's body was found on May 12, 1931. His suspected cause of death was heart failure through overexertion.
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. The accepted explanations or theories at the time posited land bridges to explain the fossil anomalies; animals and plants could have migrated between fixed separate continents by crossing the land bridges. But Wegener was increasingly convinced that the continents themselves had shifted away from a primal single massive supercontinent, which drifted apart about 180 million years ago, to judge from the fossil evidence.[2] Wegener used land features, fossils, and climate as evidence to support his hypothesis of continental drift. Examples of land features such as mountain ranges in Africa and South America lined up; also coal fields on Europe matched up with coal fields in North America. Wegener noticed that fossils from reptiles such as Mesosaurus and Lystrosaurus were found in places that are now separated by oceans. Since neither reptile could have swum great distances, Wegener inferred that these reptiles had once lived on a single landmass that split apart.This would help him be more believed.From 1912 he publicly advocated the theory of "continental drift", arguing that all the continents were once joined together in a single landmass and have drifted 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" or "All-Earth") 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.
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 gravitational pull of the sun and moon) would account for continental drift.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. Also its opponents could, as did the Leipziger geologist Franz Kossmat, argue that the oceanic crust was too firm for the continents to "simply plow through". In 1943 George Gaylord Simpson wrote a vehement attack on the theory (as well as the rival theory of sunken land bridges) and put forward his own permanantist views [3]. Alexander du Toit wrote a rejoinder in the following year[4], but such was G.G.Simpson's influence that even in countries previously sympathetic towards continental drift, like Australia, Wegener's hypotheis fell out of favour.In the early 1950s, the new science of paleomagnetism pioneered at Cambridge University by S. K. Runcorn and at Imperial College by P.M.S. Blackett was soon throwing up data in favour of Wegener's theory. By early 1953 samples taken from India showed that the country had previously been in the Southern hemisphere as predicted by Wegener. By 1959, the theory had enough supporting data that minds were starting to change, particularly in the United Kingdom where, in 1964, the Royal Society held a symposium on the subject.
Additionally, the 1960s saw several developments in geology, notably the discoveries of seafloor spreading and Wadati-Benioff zones, 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.
Awards and honors
The Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Bremerhaven, Germany, was established in 1980 on his centenary. It awards the Wegener Medal in his name.[6] The Wegener impact craters on both Mars and the Moon, as well as the asteroid 29227 Wegener and the peninsula where he died in Greenland (Wegener Peninsula near Ummannaq)The European Geosciences Union sponsors an Alfred Wegener Medal & Honorary Membership "for scientists who have achieved exceptional international standing in atmospheric, hydrological or ocean sciences, defined in their widest senses, for their merit and their scientific achievements."
Cronologia Ornitologica