Wegener Proposes Continents That Move

On 6 January 1912, German researcher Alfred Wegener presented a radical hypothesis to the German Geological Society. He proposed that the continents had previously formed a unified landmass, which he named Pangaea, before fracturing and moving across the globe to their modern locations. Wegener was the first to publish the specific term continental drift, setting out a comprehensive framework that he expanded three years later in his 1915 book on the origin of continents and oceans. He drew upon diverse lines of evidence, including the matching outlines of facing coastlines, identical fossil remains separated by broad oceans, and ancient glacial deposits distributed across distant, tropical regions.

Wegener's proposal was formed independently, yet it built on a long history of related observations. In 1596, Abraham Ortelius had noted the complementary shapes of the coasts of Africa and the Americas, suggesting they had been torn apart by cataclysms. Over the centuries, other scholars observed geological and geographic parallels across the Atlantic, including Alexander von Humboldt and Antonio Snider-Pellegrini. Later thinkers such as Roberto Mantovani conjectured that the southern landmasses had split apart due to thermal expansion and volcanic activity. Frank Bursley Taylor suggested in 1908 that continental movements formed mountain chains such as the Himalayas, offering ideas Wegener recognized as sharing notable similarities with his own.