In 1912, the German meteorologist Alfred Wegener proposed that the continents of the Earth had once been joined and were slowly drifting apart — a theory geologists ridiculed for the next 50 years, until three decades after his death, when new evidence from the ocean floor proved him right

On the evening of Saturday, 6 January 1912, in the meeting hall of the Frankfurt Geological Association, a 31-year-old German meteorologist named Alfred Wegener — an astronomer by original doctoral training, an Arctic explorer by preferred fieldwork, and by the standards of the German geological establishment of the pre-First-World-War period a substantive outsider to the [...] The post In 1912, the German meteorologist Alfred Wegener proposed that the continents of the Earth had once been joine