Frank Bursley Taylor

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Frank Bursley Taylor (born November 23, 1860 in Fort Wayne , Indiana ; † June 12, 1938 ibid) was a wealthy American amateur geologist and was known for his hypothesis of continental drift , which he presented in 1908 and published in a specialist journal in 1910 , which he still had before Alfred Wegener put it.

Taylor realized that the separation of continents like South America and Africa took place exactly on the mid-Atlantic ridge . He also found out that mountains can be created by collisions between continents. Taylor explained the movement of the continents by assuming that the moon was captured by earth's gravity 100 million years ago. This came so close to the earth that the tidal forces that occurred pulled the continents towards the equator . However, this assumption was not very credible, which made it difficult to accept the theory of continental drift (which was also known in America as the "Taylor-Wegener theory").

Wegener paid tribute to Taylor (who later became one of Wegener's first followers) in 1929, particularly in connection with the development of the Atlantic and the separation of Greenland from North America . Wegener emphasized, however, that he had only found out about Taylor's work after he had already formulated his own theory.

In 1925 Taylor was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

Individual evidence

  1. Taylor, FB: Bearing of the tertiary mountain belt on the origin of the earth's plan . In: GSA Bulletin . tape 21 , no. 2 , 1910, pp. 179-226 .
  2. Wegener, A .: The emergence of the continents and oceans, 4th edition . Friedrich Vieweg & Sohn Akt. Ges., Braunschweig 1929.