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The crater Wegener on the Moon and the crater Wegener on Mars, as well as the asteroid 29227 Wegener, the Wegener Peninsula in Eastern Greenland and the peninsula where he died in Western Greenland near Ummannaq, , are named after
Sep 17, 2024 · 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,...
- Early Life
- Continental Drift
- Later Life
- Death
- Legacy
- Sources
Alfred Lothar Wegener was born on November 1, 1880, in Berlin, Germany. During his childhood, Wegener's father ran an orphanage. Wegener took an interest in physical and earth sciences and studied these subjects at universities in both Germany and Austria. He graduated with a Ph.D. in astronomy from the University of Berlin in 1905. He briefly serv...
Shortly after receiving his Ph.D., Wegener began teaching at the University of Marburg in Germany, and in 1910 he drafted his "Thermodynamics of the Atmosphere," which would later become an important meteorological textbook. During his time at the university, Wegener developed an interest in the ancient history of the Earth's continents and their p...
From 1924 to 1930, Wegener was a professor of meteorology and geophysics at the University of Graz in Austria. At a 1927 symposium, he introduced the idea of Pangaea, a Greek term meaning "all lands," to describe the supercontinent that he believed existed on the Earth millions of years ago. Scientists now believe that such a continent did exist—it...
In 1930, Wegener took part in his last expedition to Greenland to set up a winter weather station that would monitor the jet stream in the upper atmosphere over the North Pole. Severe weather delayed the start of the trip and made it extremely difficult for Wegener and the 14 other explorers and scientists with him to reach the weather station. Eve...
For most of his life, Wegener remained dedicated to his theory of continental drift and Pangaea despite receiving harsh criticism from other scientists, many of whom believed the oceanic crust was too rigid to permit the movement of tectonic plates. By the time of his death in 1930, his ideas were almost entirely rejected by the scientific communit...
Bressan, David. “May 12, 1931: Alfred Wegener's Last Journey.” Scientific American Blog Network, 12 May 2013.Oreskes, Naomi, and Homer E. LeGrand. "Plate Tectonics: An Insider's History of the Modern Theory of the Earth." Westview, 2003.Wegener, Alfred. "The Origin of Continents and Oceans." Dover Publications, 1992.Yount, Lisa. "Alfred Wegener: Creator of the Continental Drift Theory." Chelsea House Publishers, 2009.- Amanda Briney
On an unknown day in mid-November 1930, Alfred Wegener died on his fourth expedition to Greenland. He was 50 years old. He had been trying to resupply a remote camp in very bad weather.
This is one of the last photographs of Wegener, who died later during the expedition (see text). (Photograph courtesy of the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research, Bremerhaven, Germany.) Wegener was still an energetic, brilliant researcher when he died at the age of 50.
Historian Christian Kehrt presents a short biographical profile of geologist and polar explorer Alfred Wegener, with historic photographs. Wegener's diaries from his three Greenland expeditions (1906–1931)—digitized, transcribed, and translated—are the focus of this Virtual Exhibition.
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Apr 24, 2024 · Alfred Wegener died in Greenland in 1930 while carrying out studies related to glaciation and climate. At the time of his death, his ideas were tentatively accepted by only a small minority of geologists, and soundly rejected by most.
