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 kept working, returning to Greenland on what would be his final expedition in November 1930, where he died on the ice. Three decades later, discoveries in palaeomagnetism validated continental drift and built the foundation for plate tectonics, the framework that now anchors earth science.