Alfred Wegener

Alfred Lothar Wegener (November 1, 1880 – November 1930) was a German polar researcher, geophysicist and meteorologist.

During his lifetime he was primarily known for his achievements in meteorology and as a pioneer of polar research, but today he is most remembered for advancing the theory of continental drift (Kontinentalverschiebung) in 1912, which hypothesized that the continents were slowly drifting around the Earth. His hypothesis was controversial and not widely accepted until the 1950s, when numerous discoveries such as palaeomagnetism provided strong support for continental drift, and thereby a substantial basis for today's model of Plate tectonics.

Alfred Wegener in Supervolcano
Kelly Ferguson taught "Introduction to Geology" at Cal State, Dominguez Hills. She covered the history of plate tectonics starting with Wegener. She taught that Wegener first proposed continental drift just after World War I but sufficient evidence to support it didn't accumulate until the 1960s resulting in him being labeled a crackpot. She also reminisced that the professors that taught her when she was an undergraduate had lived through the controversy and they said that it had hit geology as hard as Copernicus and Galileo had hit astronomy.