who discovered continental drift

The continental drift hypothesis was first formulated and developed in detail by the German scientist Alfred Wegener in the early 20th century.

Core answer

• Alfred Wegener proposed the first comprehensive theory of continental drift in 1912, arguing that the continents had once formed a single supercontinent and slowly moved apart over geologic time.

• Earlier thinkers had noticed that continents seemed to fit together, but Wegener was the one who turned those observations into a systematic scientific hypothesis supported by geological, fossil, and climatic evidence.

A bit of background

• In a 1912 lecture and later in his book The Origin of Continents and Oceans , Wegener suggested that all continents were once joined in a supercontinent he called Pangaea, which later fragmented and drifted to their present positions.

• His idea was controversial at the time because he could not convincingly explain the driving force behind the movement, so many geologists initially rejected it even though the fit of coastlines and matching fossils were compelling clues.

Others who noticed it earlier

• As early as the 16th century, the cartographer Abraham Ortelius pointed out that the coasts of the Americas and Europe–Africa looked like they might once have been joined and speculated that they had drifted apart.

• In the 19th century, Antonio Snider-Pellegrini and others suggested that similar fossils on opposite sides of the Atlantic implied a former single landmass, but these ideas remained fragmentary compared with Wegener’s later, unified hypothesis.

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