This contradicted the prevailing hypothesis among geologists at the time, which postulated that land bridges had once connected the continents and were now buried under the ocean.
On January 6, 1912, he made the first presentation of his hypothesis of continental drift at a meeting of the German Geological Society in Frankfurt, right before embarking on another scientific expedition to Denmark and Greenland. “A conviction of the fundamental soundness of the idea took root in my mind,” he later wrote. Wegener noticed, as Ortelius did, the same jigsaw puzzle-like shapes of the continents, and how well they seemed to fit together. He noted the striking similarities between types of rock and fossils, especially fossilized plants. While browsing in the university library one day, Wegener happened upon a scientific paper listing fossils of plants and animals on opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean.
He became a tutor at the University of Marburg, taking time out to join expeditions to Greenland in 19 to study polar air circulation. His work in meteorology was especially significant, since he pioneered the use of balloons to track air circulation and published a widely used standard textbook. in astronomy from the University of Berlin in 1904, but his scientific interests were much broader, encompassing geophysics, meteorology, and climatology. But it was a German scientist named Alfred Wegener who developed a robust hypothesis of continental drift over 300 years later.īorn in 1880, Wegener earned his Ph.D. He noted how the geometry of the coasts of America and Europe/Africa seemed to match like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle, and proposed they had gradually drifted apart over time due to earthquakes and floods. Ortelius created the first modern atlas: the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum ( Theater of the World). The notion that the continents were once joined together dates back to at least the 16th century, with the Flemish cartographer and geographer Abraham Ortelius.
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