Alfred Wegener: The Scientist Who Saw That Continents Move

On November first, eighteen eighty, Alfred Lothar Wegener was born in Berlin, Germany. He was a geophysicist, meteorologist, and polar explorer, and his academic field was paleoclimatology and geology.

Wegener is world-famous for his groundbreaking theory of continental drift. In nineteen twelve, he noticed that the coastlines of continents like South America and Africa appeared to fit together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. He gathered impressive scientific evidence supporting the theory: identical fossils on different continents, matching mountain ranges separated by oceans, and traces of ancient glaciers in areas that today have a tropical climate. Wegener proposed that all the Earth's continents were once united in a supercontinent he called Pangaea, and that they had drifted apart over millions of years. Although his theory was heavily opposed and ridiculed during his lifetime because he could not explain how the continents moved, it nevertheless laid the foundation for the modern theory of plate tectonics. Today, Wegener is recognized as a visionary scientist whose work completely changed our understanding of the Earth's dynamic nature.