Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
A brief introduction to Plate Tectonics, based on the work of Alfred Wegener; Animation of continental drift for last 1 billion years; Maps of continental drift, from the Precambrian to the future; 3D visualization of what did Earth look like from 750 million years ago to present (at present location of your choice)
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 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.
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 ...
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
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.