Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Wegener said that of all those theories, Taylor's had the most similarities to his own. For a time in the mid-20th century, the theory of continental drift was referred to as the "Taylor-Wegener hypothesis". [26] [29] [30] [31] Alfred Wegener first presented his hypothesis to the German Geological Society on 6 January 1912. [5]
Alfred Wegener was born in Berlin on 1 November 1880, the youngest of five children, to Richard Wegener and his wife Anna. His father was a theologian and teacher of classical languages at the Joachimsthalschen Gymnasium [ 6 ] and Berlinisches Gymnasium zum Grauen Kloster .
Wegener used the name "Pangaea" once in the 1920 edition of his book, referring to the ancient supercontinent as "the Pangaea of the Carboniferous". [12] He used the Germanized form Pangäa , but the name entered German and English scientific literature (in 1922 [ 13 ] and 1926, respectively) in the Latinized form Pangaea , especially during a ...
Although Wegener's theory was formed independently and was more complete than those of his predecessors, Wegener later credited a number of past authors with similar ideas: [18] Franklin Coxworthy (between 1848 and 1890), [19] Roberto Mantovani (between 1889 and 1909), William Henry Pickering (1907) [20] and Frank Bursley Taylor (1908).
The discovery of this worldwide ridge system led to the theory of seafloor spreading and general acceptance of Alfred Wegener's theory of continental drift and expansion in the modified form of plate tectonics. The ridge is central to the breakup of the hypothetical supercontinent of Pangaea that began some 180 million years ago.
Polflucht (from German, flight from the poles) is a geophysical concept invoked in 1922 by Alfred Wegener to explain his ideas of continental drift.. The pole-flight force is that component of the centrifugal force during the rotation of the Earth that acts tangentially to the Earth's surface.
Alfred Wegener first proposed in 1915 that continents had once been joined together and had since moved apart. [ 6 ] [ 7 ] Although he produced an abundance of circumstantial evidence, his theory met with little acceptance for two reasons: (1) no mechanism for continental drift was known, and (2) there was no way to reconstruct the movements of ...
He was an early proponent of Alfred Wegener's theory of continental drift, viewing plate tectonics and continental collisions as the best explanation for the formation of the Alps. He is also noted for his application of the theory of tectonics to the continent of Asia. He founded the Geological Institute of Neuchâtel, Switzerland.