Alfred Wegener, the father of today’s plate tectonics, is an underestimated scientist. Perhaps it is because he died at the age of 50, that was 1930. He not only had his fields, meteorology and astronomy, in mind, but always the whole world with its intertwined. He also had a penchant for adventure. In it he resembles Alexander von Humboldt, which it did not go into the arctic ice cream, but into the tropics.
Günther Wessel, a multi -award -winning author, describes the life of the German researcher chronologically. He sprinkles chapters that have only indirectly to do with Wegener, for example to polar research or the strange phenomenon that many men kept going to risky expeditions at the time despite the known dangers. Wegener also had death in mind. Despite a heart defect, he went back to Greenland.
Of course, the book is also about continental shift. The fact that many continental margins such as puzzle pieces fit together had already recognized before Wegen. But Wegener has gathered more and more indications of his theory and showed that the conventional attempts to explain the geologists could not be correct.
Günther Wessel describes all of this very impressively. The various expeditions in Wegen to Greenland ensure the necessary tension alone. Klaus Jacob
Günther Wessel:
Alfred Wegener
Mare Verlag, 288 pages, € 28, –
ISBN 978-3-86648-692-8
