Given his fertile mind, Wegener just possibly might have recognized the shallow Mid-Atlantic Ridge as a geologically young feature resulting from thermal expansion, and the central valley as a rift valley resulting from stretching of the oceanic crust.
From stretched, young crust in the middle of the ocean to seafloor spreading and plate tectonics would have been short mental leaps for a big thinker like Wegener. This conjectural scenario by Dr.
Peter R. Vogt U. Naval Research Laboratory, Washington, D. And who knows how things will turn out tomorrow. One would think that this forced rest would encourage my mind to ponder, solve scientific questions, and to concentrate on things that I know I think about constantly when I am back home.
But only once in a while do I find myself coming up with some unimpressive beginnings of ideas. All these problems, that of the volcanos, the cyclones, the blue strips in the ice, the daily fluctuation of the barometer, the rotation in the solar system, etc. It persistently returns to two things, back and forth, and both are of a shamefully material nature: How will Else and I arrange things, and what kind of food will we cook?
Note that the first question comes up primarily after our meals, the second before. During World War I Wegener worked as a meteorologist. In addition to these duties, he found time to write his famous book on continental drift. After World War I the ambitious and by then well-known Wegener was still having trouble finding a professorship.
In he accepted an offer from the University of Graz Austria , where he spent fruitful years as an academic teacher and researcher. In the early s, academic life was still disrupted by the consequences of World War I. All in all, Wegener participated in four polar expeditions: the Danmark Expedition — , the glaciological Danish North Greenland Expedition with Johann Peter Koch , the pre-expedition , documented neither in the Deutsches Museum archives nor in this virtual exhibition, and the German Greenland Expedition — He is well known as an expert on Greenland and for his close relations with the Inuit populations of Denmark and Greenland.
When he returned he took up teaching meteorology at the University of Marburg, where he was a very popular lecturer. In , Wegener noticed the matching coastlines of the Atlantic continents -- they looked on maps like they had once been fit together. He was not the first to notice this, but it was an idea that would never leave his thoughts.
In , he published a textbook on the thermodynamics of atmosphere, but at the same time he pursued his studies of the continents. He first spoke on the topic in January of , where he put forth the idea of "continental displacement" or what later was called continental drift. The year was busy for Wegener: he got married to the daughter of Germany's leading meteorologist and he returned to Greenland, making the longest crossing of the ice cap ever made on foot.
Tests were done, but with the most reliable instruments of the time no movement of the continents was detected. The edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica still did not believe Wegener, but that year many geologists began siding with him, in view of new evidence. This new theory— plate tectonics —also explained that earthquakes and tsunamis occur when two plates rub against one another, and that when they collide head-on, large mountain ranges are formed.
In addition, thanks to geolocation satellites, we are now able to detect that Europe and North America are moving apart, although at the same speed that a fingernail grows: two metres in a lifetime.
Today we have all learned at school—or even before, in cartoons—the theory of continental drift. But Wegener died in , long before his success was recognised. During an expedition in Greenland, he left the camp for supplies and was found frozen months later. He was buried there and is still there, although he is now about two metres further away from his birthplace in Berlin.
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