The Relentless Moon by Mary Robinette Kowal

Author:Mary Robinette Kowal
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

TWENTY-NINE

POLAR EXPLORER’S BODY FOUND AS GLACIERS MELT

By John Schwartz, Special to the National Times

NUUK, Greenland, May 3, 1963—The ice cap of this northern nation gave up one of its secrets today, as the body of the scientist and explorer Alfred Wegener was uncovered by the receding snow and ice.

Alfred Lothar Wegener, who came up with the concept of continental drift, died on a Greenland expedition in 1930.

Wegener proposed in 1912 that the Earth’s continents were once joined but broke up and drifted away from each other. Wegener was not the first to notice that the east coast of South America seemed to fit together with the west coast of Africa, but he assembled a wealth of geological and fossil evidence to support the theory. While any schoolchild can see that the eastern South America could nestle snugly against western Africa, Wegener did the scientific work of assembling geological and fossil data that substantiated his claims; finding similar fossils of animals and plants across a vast ocean suggested that the separate continents had once been joined in a supercontinent he called Pangea. Mainstream geologists, however, disputed his theory, which languished until the 1960s, when the developing field of plate tectonics showed the underlying mechanism of continental movement.

“Climate change is a global crisis, but it can surprise us with good news,” said Peter Harrer, Wegener’s grandson. “I am pleased that we will be able to return my grandfather’s remains to his ancestral home instead of the bleak Arctic wastes.”

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