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A second problem was that Wegener's estimate of the speed of continental motion, 250 cm/year (100 in/year), was implausibly high. [34] (The currently accepted rate for the separation of the Americas from Europe and Africa is about 2.5 cm/year (1 in/year).) [35] Furthermore, Wegener was treated less seriously because he was not a geologist. Even ...
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).
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.
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 spearheaded the original theory of continental drift and spent much of his life devoted to this theory. He proposed "Pangaea", one unified giant continent. [9] During the development of continental drift theory, there was not much exploration of the
1911 – Arthur Holmes uses radioactivity to date rocks, the oldest being 1.6 billion years old; 1912 – Alfred Wegener proposes that all the continents once formed a single landmass called Pangaea that broke apart via continental drift; 1912 – George Barrow maps zones of metamorphism (the Barrovian sequence) in southern Scotland
His intent was to test his theory that the geomagnetic field was related to Earth's rotation, a theory that he ultimately rejected; but the astatic magnetometer became the basic tool of paleomagnetism and led to a revival of the theory of continental drift. Alfred Wegener first proposed in 1915 that continents had once been joined together and ...
Antonio Snider-Pellegrini (1802–1885) was a French geographer and geologist who theorized about the possibility of continental drift, anticipating Wegener's theories concerning Pangaea by several decades. In 1858, Snider-Pellegrini published his book, La Création et ses mystères dévoilés ("The Creation and its Mysteries Unveiled").