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Wegener said that of all those theories, Taylor's had the most similarities to his own. For a time in the mid-20th century, the theory of continental drift was referred to as the "Taylor-Wegener hypothesis". [26] [29] [30] [31] Alfred Wegener first presented his hypothesis to the German Geological Society on 6 January 1912. [5]
But Wegener only published his idea after reading a paper in 1911 which criticised the prevalent hypothesis, that a bridge of land once connected Europe and America, on the grounds that this contradicts isostasy. [20] Wegener's main interest was meteorology, and he wanted to join the Denmark-Greenland expedition scheduled for mid-1912.
Polflucht (from German, flight from the poles) is a geophysical concept invoked in 1922 by Alfred Wegener to explain his ideas of continental drift.. The pole-flight force is that component of the centrifugal force during the rotation of the Earth that acts tangentially to the Earth's surface.
Although Wegener's theory was formed independently and was more complete than those of his predecessors, Wegener later credited a number of past authors with similar ideas: [18] Franklin Coxworthy (between 1848 and 1890), [19] Roberto Mantovani (between 1889 and 1909), William Henry Pickering (1907) [20] and Frank Bursley Taylor (1908). [21]
Wegener expanded his theory in his 1915 book The Origin of Continents and Oceans. [49] Starting from the idea (also expressed by his forerunners) that the present continents once formed a single land mass (later called Pangaea ), Wegener suggested that these separated and drifted apart, likening them to "icebergs" of low density sial floating ...
[8] [9] Although Alfred Wegener noticed some similarities to his own hypothesis of continental drift, he did not mention Earth expansion as the cause of drift in Mantovani's hypothesis. [10] A compromise between Earth-expansion and Earth-contraction is the "theory of thermal cycles" by Irish physicist John Joly.
A worker stocks grocery items at Northgate Market in Los Angeles. California voters have rejected a ballot measure that would have raised the state's hourly minimum wage to $18 from $16.
In 1912 Alfred Wegener proposed the theory of Continental Drift. [26] This theory suggests that the shapes of continents and matching coastline geology between some continents indicates they were joined in the past and formed a single landmass known as Pangaea; thereafter they separated and drifted like rafts over the ocean floor, currently ...