Die Entstehung Der Kontinente Und Ozeane
1915

Wegener's 1915 masterpiece rewrote Earth's story. He proposed that the continents were once joined in a single supercontinent, Pangaea, and have been slowly drifting apart ever since. This was radical. The scientific establishment dismissed him, mocked him, denied him tenure. He died on an Arctic expedition in 1930, still considered a crank. Yet the evidence he gathered was irresistible: the matching coastlines of South America and Africa, identical fossils found on opposite sides of oceans, ancient glacial scars in now-tropical regions. Wegener saw patterns that others could not, or would not. The book presents his case with relentless detail, geological, paleontological, climatological, building an architecture of proof that would take half a century to verify. Today, plate tectonics confirms every major claim. What was heresy became gospel. This is the story of how one man looked at a world map and saw it differently, and how science eventually caught up to his vision.
Editions
X-Ray
“Scientists still do not appear to understand sufficiently that all earth sciences must contribute evidence toward unveiling the state of our planet in earlier times, and that the truth of the matter can only be reached by combing all this evidence. ... It is only by combing the information furnished by all the earth sciences that we can hope to determine 'truth' here, that is to say, to find the picture that sets out all the known facts in the best arrangement and that therefore has the highest degree of probability. Further, we have to be prepared always for the possibility that each new discovery, no matter what science furnishes it, may modify the conclusions we draw.””
— Alfred Wegener