Schematic diagram of continental drift

Alfred Lothar Wegener was a German meteorologist and geophysicist who was born in Berlin on November 1, 1880, and died while exploring the Greenland ice sheet in November 1930. He is known as the "father of the theory of continental drift."

Wegener mainly studied atmospheric thermodynamics and paleometology. In 1912, he proposed a hypothesis about the movement of the earth's crust and the distribution of oceanic continents - the "continental drift theory". He believed that the silicon-aluminum layer of the earth's crust was floating on top of the silicon-magnesium layer, based on the data that the two sides of the Atlantic Ocean, especially the coast of Africa and South America, were very similar. He also assumed that the world's continents were a unified whole (Pangaea) before the Paleozoic Carboniferous, surrounded by vast oceans. Later, especially at the end of the Mesozoic, the Pangaea broke into several pieces under the action of the centrifugal force generated by the tidal force of celestial bodies and the rotation of the earth, and drifted separately on the silicon-magnesium layer, gradually forming the distribution of continents and oceans in the world today. However, this hypothesis is difficult to explain some major issues, such as the driving force of continental movement, deep earthquakes, and orogenic structures.

In 1968, French geologist Le Bichon proposed six major plates based on previous research: the Eurasian plate, the African plate, the American plate, the Indian plate, the Antarctic plate and the Pacific plate. Plate theory well solved the drift dynamic problem that Wigner had not solved during his lifetime, allowing geology to be comprehensively integrated at a new level. As plate movement was established as the basic form of earth's geological movement, geoscience has entered a new stage of development. The continents must merge and divide for a long time, and the oceans sometimes expand and sometimes close, which has become an accepted tectonic picture. By the 1980s, people really believed that from the introduction of the continental drift theory to the establishment of the plate theory, it constituted a veritable great revolution in the field of modern geoscience.