A weatherman saw the continents had moved. Geology laughed — until the seafloor proved him right.
In the autumn of 1911, a young meteorologist leafing through a library in Marburg came across a list of fossils found on both sides of the Atlantic: the same plants, the same reptiles, in Brazil and in Africa, separated by thousands of kilometres of ocean. The textbooks explained it with sunken land bridges. Alfred Wegener had a stranger idea. He had already noticed how neatly the bulge of South America tucked into the armpit of Africa. What if the continents themselves had once been joined — and had drifted apart?
He was not a geologist, and the geologists did not forgive him for it. For the rest of his life the idea that would become the foundation of modern earth science was treated as a fantasy. He died on the Greenland ice in 1930, still defending it. Proof arrived three decades later, from the bottom of the sea.
From the clouds to the ice
The lifeline
1880
Born 1 November in Berlin, youngest of five children of a theologian
1906
With his brother Kurt, sets a world record of 52½ hours aloft in a balloon
1912
On 6 January, unveils continental drift in a lecture in Frankfurt
1915
Twice wounded in the war, writes The Origin of Continents and Oceans while recovering
1924
Given a chair in meteorology and geophysics at Graz, created for him
1930
Leaves the ice station Eismitte on his 50th birthday and is never seen alive again
By the numbers
The measure of him
52½
Hours aloft with his brother Kurt in 1906, a world record for balloon flight
4
Expeditions to Greenland: 1906, 1912, 1929 and the fatal one of 1930
4
Editions of his drift book (1915–1929), each answering more critics
~30 yrs
From his death to seafloor spreading in the early 1960s, which proved him right
What he worked out
The work
1906–08
The Danmark Expedition to northeast Greenland. As its meteorologist he flew kites and tethered balloons to measure the polar air, the first time this was done in Greenland.
1911
Thermodynamik der Atmosphäre, a standard textbook. In it he described how ice crystals grow at the expense of water droplets in clouds. The idea was later built on by Bergeron and Findeisen and now carries all three names.
1912
Continental drift. The fit of the coastlines, matching fossils and rock layers on opposite shores, and ancient climates in the wrong places, all explained by one supercontinent he later called Pangaea.
1912–13
Across the ice cap with J. P. Koch. They spent the winter on the Greenland ice sheet, the first expedition to do so, then made the longest crossing of it yet achieved on foot.
1924
Die Klimate der geologischen Vorzeit, with his father-in-law, the climatologist Wladimir Köppen, reading the climates of the deep past from the rocks.
1930
Eismitte. He led the German Greenland Expedition, which set up a station in the middle of the ice sheet to measure the ice's thickness and record a winter of weather there.
Mocked, then vindicated
Recognition
In his lifetime
Dismissed as an outsider: he was trained in astronomy and meteorology, not geology
Savaged at a 1926 symposium in New York, where most speakers rejected drift
Could not name a force strong enough to move continents, which critics treated as fatal
Respected as a meteorologist and polar explorer, while his drift theory was ridiculed
Today
Plate tectonics, built on seafloor spreading in the 1960s, confirms that the continents move
Germany's polar research centre, founded in 1980, is the Alfred Wegener Institute
Craters on the Moon and Mars, and an asteroid, carry his name
Pangaea is now taught in schools everywhere
The place that made him — and kept him
The Greenland ice sheet
In September 1930, with the station at Eismitte short of fuel, Wegener led a sledge party of supplies inland himself. Most of the Greenlanders turned back in the cold. He reached the station on 30 October with Fritz Loewe and Rasmus Villumsen, then set out again for the coast with Villumsen on 1 November. His body was found the next May, about halfway back, carefully buried in the snow. Villumsen was never found. Wegener was left where he lay, and the ice has covered him ever since.
~400 km
How far inland from the west coast Eismitte stood
~3,000 m
Height of the ice surface at the station
12 May
1931: the day searchers found his grave, marked by his skis
“Scientists still do not appear to understand sufficiently that all earth sciences must contribute evidence toward unveiling the state of our planet in earlier times, and that the truth of the matter can only be reached by combining all this evidence.”
— Alfred Wegener, The Origin of Continents and Oceans, 4th ed., 1929
