Wegener's Geology
The Sciences
Wegener wrote his future wife suggesting her to review the puzzle-like similarities of the East coast of South America and the West Coast of Africa:
“Doesn’t it seem as though they would have fit against each other perfectly in the past? This is an idea I will have to pursue.”
December 1910 —
He then set out to do exactly that; he proposed the Continantal Drift Theory.
In his 1912 and 1915 revision of “The origins of Continents and Oceans”, Alfred Wegener suggested that as recent as 200 million years ago the continents were mostly connected and formed a supercontinent called “Pangaea”. Wegener explained that the current locations of our continents are due to them drifting. He proposed that the fact that the continents are made up of Granite which is less dense than the volcanic basalt below it alows them to float on it; similar to the action of an iceberg floating on water.