Alfred Wegener

Alfred Lothar Wegener was born 1 November 1880 in Germany and trained across climatology, geology, geophysics, and meteorology. In his own time he was known for polar research — leading expeditions to Greenland where his teams were first to overwinter on the inland ice sheet and first to bore cores from a moving Arctic glacier, mapping atmospheric circulation patterns before anyone had named the jet stream. But in 1912 he proposed something else: that the continents drift slowly across the Earth's surface, a hypothesis he called Kontinentalverschiebung. Mainstream geology rejected it. Wegener…