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"Utter, damned rot!" was the response of the president of the American Philosophical Society, when he first encountered Alfred Wegener's theory of continental drift. In his 1915 book, The Origin of Continents and Oceans, which is regarded as one of the most influential and controversial books in the history of science Wegener argued that all the continents had once been joined together as a giant land mass he called Pangaea – "All-Lands" or "All-Earth".

Because of the war his book went unnoticed until 1922, when a third edition was translated into English, French, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish. Apart from a few supporters, among them the South African geologist Alexander du Toit, Wegener's hypothesis was met with militant hostility by the international geological community. It was only in the mid-1950's, in the face of overwhelming evidence presented by oceanographic and  paleomagnetic discoveries that Wegener was vindicated, more than twenty years after his death at age 50, as the leader of an expedition in Greenland to study the ice cap and its climate.

When Wegener's body was found, six months after he went missing, his friends left his body as they found it and built an ice-block mausoleum over it. Later a 20-foot cross made from boring tools was erected to mark the site, all of which has since vanished deep under the ice.

Das Groβe Eis. The Big Ice. Alfred Wegener's body was found buried in a sleeping bag cover on May 12, 1931, six months after he went missing during a rescue mission to take supplies to fellow members of a 1930 expedition to the Polar Cap.
Photo: Alfred-Wegener-Institut