Earth science
How did Pangaea get its name? I know it's from a Greek word meaning "all Earth." Is there any other information available?
Dear Jennifer, I took a look in Van Nostrand's Scientific Encyclopedia (Considine, 2002) and the Hutchinson Dictionary of Scientific Biography (Helicon Publishing, 1999). They credit Alfred Wegener (1880–1930), a German geologist, with first theorizing that a "supercontinent" he named Pangaea had existed before about 200 million years ago during the Mesozoic Era. He chose the name for its Greek meaning. Wegener was born in Berlin and studied at Heidelberg, Innsbruck and Berlin, until he got a doctorate in astronomy in 1904. He pursued a career in meteorology rather than astronomy, however, teaching at Marburg for several years. The controversy over his ideas about Pangaea and continental drift made it impossible for Wagener to teach in any German university, but the University of Graz in Austria was more tolerant of oddball ideas and created a chair in meteorology and geophysics just for him in 1924. (Meteorology was the hot scientific topic of the day, since the technologies of telegraph, transatlantic cable, and radio were fostering rapid advances in tracking storms and forecasting weather.) Inspired by the jigsaw-puzzle shapes of the continents that seem to fit together in places, in 1910 Wegener began developing a theory of continental drift. Wegner thought perhaps the wandering continents were influenced by tides, among other things, which proved not to be true. But he was the first person to really give the idea of continental drift scientific plausibility. By 1929 his theories were quite well developed and are still seen as largely valid. At the time, because scientists had not yet come up with a satisfactory reason for how continental drift might happen, Wegner's hypothesis was pretty widely derided as "geopoetry." It was only the development of plate tectonics after World War II that the idea of Pangaea won widespread support. But today Wegener is remembered as one of the most influential geologists of the twentieth century. Wegener was a polar explorer as well as a geologist. He died while crossing the Greenland ice sheet on his fourth expedition there.