Alfred Wegener

Alfred Wegener was a meteorologist and polar explorer when he proposed in 1912, and in his 1915 book The Origin of Continents and Oceans, that the continents had once been joined and drifted apart. He drew on fossils, rock formations and past climates across fields. Geologists largely rejected the idea, partly because he lacked a mechanism and was an outsider; plate tectonics vindicated him in the 1960s, decades after his death in Greenland in 1930.