Pole flight

The polar flight of the continents was a hypothesis of the geophysicist Alfred Wegener , with which he tried to explain the continental drift he discovered . The hypothesis was elaborated in 1920 by Paul Sophus Epstein , but was soon refuted.

Wegener and Epstein assumed that the continent blocks ( sial ) of the earth's crust can move slowly by swimming on the underlying, more plastic Sima layer . The isostatic phenomenon of the mountain roots was still unknown to the scientists , according to which the earth's crust dips deeper into the earth's mantle the higher the mountains are. The resulting additional resistance to movement can not be overcome by the pole displacement force assumed as the cause . The assumptions made at the time about the plasticity of SiAl and SiMa also turned out to be incorrect.

Today's theory of plate tectonics assumes slow upheavals in the earth's mantle as the cause of the continental shifts.

Literature and Sources

• On the flight of the continents from the pole, F.Nölke 1921
• The concise Oxford Dictionary of Earth Sciences (topic 'Polflucht'), Oxford 1990