Thursday, May 12, 2011

Discovered This Day: The Frozen Body of Alfred Wegner


© Marvel Comics
In 1931, the frozen body of Alfred Wegener was found by a search party in Greenland, where he had been on his fourth expedition since 1906 to study the ice cap and its climate. He was last seen alive by his colleagues on his 50th birthday, Nov. 1, 1930, as he left the Eismitte research post. He set off to return to the base camp at the coast with Greenlander Rasmus Villumsen after they brought relief supplies to the outpost.

Wegener was the German meteorologist and geophysicist who first gave a well-developed hypothesis of continental drift. Others saw the fit of coastlines of South America and Africa, but Wegener added more geologic and paleontologic evidence that these two continents were once joined. From Today In Science History