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Alfred Wegener has been mischaracterised as a lone genius whose theory of continental drift met widespread rejection until well after his death. In fact, the main tenets of the theory gained widespread acceptance by European researchers already in the 1920s, and the debates were mostly about specific details.
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]
Wegener expanded his theory in his 1915 book The Origin of Continents and Oceans. [49] Starting from the idea (also expressed by his forerunners) that the present continents once formed a single land mass (later called Pangaea ), Wegener suggested that these separated and drifted apart, likening them to "icebergs" of low density sial floating ...
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 F P f {\displaystyle F_{\mathrm {Pf} }} is that component of the centrifugal force during the rotation of the Earth that acts tangentially to the Earth's surface.
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 ...
Wegener's continental drift hypotheses is a logical consequence of: the theory of thrusting (alpine geology), the isostasy, the continents forms resulting from the supercontinent Gondwana break up, the past and present-day life forms on both sides of the Gondwana continent margins, and the Permo-Carboniferous moraine deposits in South Gondwana.
Alfred Wegener (1880–1930), German geologist who originated the theory of continental drift; Kapitänleutnant Bernhard Wegener, commander of German submarine U-27, killed in one of the two Baralong incidents in 1915
[8] [9] Although Alfred Wegener noticed some similarities to his own hypothesis of continental drift, he did not mention Earth expansion as the cause of drift in Mantovani's hypothesis. [10] A compromise between Earth-expansion and Earth-contraction is the "theory of thermal cycles" by Irish physicist John Joly.