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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.
Continental drift is the scientific theory, originating in the early 20th century, that Earth's continents move or drift relative to each other over geologic time. [1] The theory of continental drift has since been validated and incorporated into the science of plate tectonics, which studies the movement of the continents as they ride on plates of the Earth's lithosphere.
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.
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). [21]
Alexander Logie du Toit FRS [1] (/ d uː ˈ t ɔɪ / doo-TOY; 14 March 1878 – 25 February 1948) was a geologist from South Africa and an early supporter of Alfred Wegener's theory of continental drift. [2]
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
The German Greenland Expedition (German: Deutsche Grönlandexpedition), also known as the Wegener Expedition, was an expedition to Greenland in 1930–1931. It was led by German scientist Alfred Wegener (1880–1930), who had previously taken part in two other ventures to Greenland.
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 ...