X-Nico

8 unusual facts about Alfred Wegener


A Prince of the Captivity

The Greenland expedition episode in the novel was inspired by German scientist Alfred Wegener's fatal 1930 expedition.

Antonio Snider-Pellegrini

Antonio Snider-Pellegrini (1802–1885) was a French geographer and scientist who theorized about the possibility of continental drift, anticipating Wegener's theories concerning Pangaea by several decades.

Atmospheric thermodynamics

In 1911 von Alfred Wegener published a book "Thermodynamik der Atmosphäre", Leipzig, J. A. Barth.

Clarinetania, Greenland

German scientist, geologist, and meteorologist Alfred Wegener died at Clarinetania on November 2, 1930 at the age of 50.

Domenico Lovisato

A manuscript recording a speech that he made in Sondrio in 1874 is interesting, since it proposes a theory of continental drift forty years before Alfred Wegener formally proposed his theory.

Drummond Matthews

Alfred Wegener's theory of continental drift had never gained much scientific support due to its lack of any satisfactory mechanism to drive the process.

Geological Commission of the Cape of Good Hope

From the detailed maps he and others created of this region for the Survey, and from later mapping in southern South America du Toit published literature in support of Alfred Wegener's theory of continental drift.

Roberto Mantovani

Alfred Wegener saw similarities to his own theory, but did not support Mantovani's earth-expansion hypothesis.


Bergeron process

The Wegener–Bergeron–Findeisen process (after Alfred Wegener, Tor Bergeron and W. Findeisen), (or "cold-rain process") is a process of ice crystal growth that occurs in mixed phase clouds (containing a mixture of supercooled water and ice) in regions where the ambient vapor pressure falls between the saturation vapor pressure over water and the saturation vapor pressure over ice.

Frank Bursley Taylor

Frank Bursley Taylor's ideas about continental drift were independently discovered by Alfred Wegener in Germany three years later, on January 1912, but even with Wegener's extensive extra research the idea did not achieve acceptance until the 1960s when a vast weight of evidence had accrued via Harry Hess, Fred Vine and Drummond Matthews.


see also