Alfred Wegener

"The author of the theory of continental drift - the direct ancestor of the modern theory of plate tectonics and one of the key scientific concepts of the past century - Wegener also made major contributions to geology, geophysics, astronomy, geodesy, atmospheric physics, meteorology, and glaciology. Remarkably, he completed this pathbreaking work while grappling variously with financial difficulty, war, economic depression, scientific isolation, illness, and injury. He ultimately died of overexertion on a journey to probe the Greenland icecap and calculate its rate of drift. Greene places…