Alfred Wegener
By: Gabby Melanson
http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/history/wegener.html
Who was Alfred Wegener?
• Alfred Lothar Wegener was born in Berlin, Germany and was brought up by his
father who was a minister who ran a orphanage.
• From a young age he was very interested in Greenland. He would hike, walk, skate
as if going through a expedition.
• He went to school at the University of Berlin for astronomy. He earned a Ph.D. in
astronomy. Not long into it he dropped astronomy and took meteorology.
• He was married to Else Koppen Wegener. He had one daughter, Elsa Wegener.
http://www.britannica.com/biography/Alfred-Lothar-Wegener
What did Alfred Wegener do?
• Alfred Wegener was a meteorologist and a geophysicist. He did lots of
expeditions in Greenland with polar air circulation. The team he worked with
had made many plenty of meteorological observations.
• He proposed that there was once a large continent. When he imagined it, he
thought they would roughly fit together.
• His hypothesis was that there was once a conjoined continent and that it
slowly drifted apart and became smaller continents.
When and where did he live and worked?
• Alfred was born and raised in Berlin, Germany. He lived there from 18801930.
• He died when he was on his way back to camp in Greenland. He was a heavy
smoker and it was believed that it was from heart failure.
• He had made many expeditions to Greenland for work on his hypothesis.
• In total he had made 4 expeditions to Greenland between 1906 and 1931.
What was his contribution and how did it
change the thinking of their time?
• His contribution to science was that he proposed the theory of “continental
drift” and that there was once a large continent (Pangaea).
• His hypothesis was only proven right until the late 1960s when there was
more study done on tectonic plates. Geologists now accept Wegener’s theory
of “continental drift” and his idea of Pangaea.
Facts about Alfred Wegener
• He noticed that the west coast of South Africa and the west coast of Africa
almost fit together perfectly.
• The Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in
Bremethaven, Germany was established in 1980. It awards the Wegener
Medal in his name.
• There is a crater on the Moon and Mars, an asteroid and the peninsula where
he died are all named after him.
http://www.famousscientists.org/alfred-wegener/
Bibliography
• http://www.britannica.com/biography/Alfred-Lothar-Wegener
• https://earthquakesandplates.wordpress.com/2008/05/12/alfred-wegener-what-
•
•
•
•
did-he-do/
http://www.environmentandsociety.org/exhibitions/wegener-diaries/greenlanddiaries
http://www.famousscientists.org/alfred-wegener/
http://geography.about.com/od/historyofgeography/a/Biography-Of-AlfredWegener.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Wegener