Continental drift
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.031127
On this date in 1912, German geophysicist Alfred Wegener published his paper that was the first fully formed theory of continental drift. In it, he proposed that in the distant past all of the continents had been a single landmass that he called Pangea. Early evidence for continental drift was seen in the complementary outlines of the continents and in similarities in geological formations separated by the oceans. However, it took another 40 years before the theory was widely accepted because of the theory’s lack of a mechanism to explain the motion. The development of the theory of plate tectonics in the 1950s and 1960s validated Wegener’s theory.
Date in History: 6 January 1912
