Alfred Wegener

Born on 1 November 1880 in Berlin, Alfred Wegener was a geophysicist and meteorologist who hypothesized continental drift. He earned a PhD in astronomy from the University of Berlin in 1905. Several years later he began researching the possibility that Earth’s continents had once fit together into one supercontinent. Other scientists had proposed the idea, noting how South America and Africa look like they are adjoining puzzle pieces. Those scientists suspected that part of the supercontinent had sunk under water. But Wegener proposed that the land masses had actually shifted, a mechanism he called “die Verschiebung der Kontinente”—continental displacement, or, more familiarly, continental drift. Wegener also devised the name Pangaea for the supercontinent. Similar-looking fossils found in the Americas and Africa from hundreds of millions of years ago backed his theory. Although his ideas wouldn’t catch on until well after his death in 1930, the theory of plate tectonics in the 1960s proved Wegener largely correct.

Date in History: 1 November 1880