A German glacial meteorologist who was an early proponent of the theory of Continental Drift. In 1912, he first pro¬ posed the theory that the continents had once been united into one single land mass the super continent Pangaea. In 1915 he published Die Entstehung der Kontinente und Ozeane (The Origin of Continents and Oceans) in which he assembled much evidence in support of the theory. He continued to advance the theory until his death, although the great geologists of the time considered it pseudoscientific.
If, as Wegener supposed, the continents were once united, then a number of strange facts about geology and animal distribution are explained. The coal fields of South Wales and Pennsylvania fit together, as do the diamondbearing beds of Brazil and southwest Africa. Marsupials, such as the kangaroo and opossum are found in Australia and New Guinea but also in South America. Despite the apparent common sense of these arguments, it was not until the 1950s and 1960s that the experimental evidence for the mechanism of continental drift showed Wegener to have been essentially correct.