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What is Wegener's continental drift theory?
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Oct 19, 2023 · In the early 20th century, Wegener published a paper explaining his theory that the continental landmasses were “drifting” across the Earth, sometimes plowing through oceans and into each other. He called this movement continental drift.
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The first truly detailed and comprehensive theory of continental drift was proposed in 1912 by Alfred Wegener, a German meteorologist. Bringing together a large mass of geologic and paleontological data, Wegener postulated that throughout most of geologic time there was only one continent, which he called Pangea.
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
4 days ago · However, in the 1950s, evidence started to trickle in that made continental drift a more viable idea. By the 1960s, scientists had amassed enough evidence to support the missing mechanism—namely, seafloor spreading—for Wegener’s hypothesis of continental drift to be accepted as the theory of plate tectonics. Ongoing GPS and earthquake ...
The similarity of southern continent geological formations had led Roberto Mantovani to conjecture in 1889 and 1909 that all the continents had once been joined into a supercontinent; Wegener noted the similarity of Mantovani's and his own maps of the former positions of the southern continents.
Alfred Wegener (born November 1, 1880, Berlin, Germany—died November 1930, Greenland) was a German meteorologist and geophysicist who formulated the first complete statement of the continental drift hypothesis.
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
- German meteorologist and geophysicist Alfred Wegener was the first person to formulate a complete statement of the continental drift hypothesis. Pr...
- Wegener noticed the similarity in the coastlines of eastern South America and western Africa and speculated that those lands had once formed a supe...
- Wegener published his theory in full in 1915, but his contemporaries mostly found it implausible. By 1930 it had been rejected by most geologists,...
Dec 14, 2021 · The theory was proposed by geophysicist and meteorologist Alfred Wegener in 1912, but was rejected by mainstream science at the time. Scientists confirmed some of Wegener's ideas decades later,...
The 1960s saw several relevant developments in geology, notably the discoveries of seafloor spreading and Wadati–Benioff zones, and this led to the rapid resurrection of the continental drift hypothesis in the form of its direct descendant, the theory of plate tectonics.
