LOESSFEST'09 | Aug. 31st – Sept. 3rd, 2009 |Novi Sad-Serbia
The New Earth Sciences Between Revolution and Evolution Contibutions of Milutin Milankovic and Alfred Wegener
Aleksandar Petrović1
1Faculty of Philology and Arts, University of Kragujevac, Republic of Serbia
Milutin Milankovic (1879 – 1958) and Alfred Wegener (1880 – 1924) have revolutionized the Earth sciences. Milankovic, who had background in Civil Engineering, revived astronomical theory of climate, dethroned geocentric causality in explanation of climate dynamics and defined climate change as a general cosmic problem, the same for all the planets with a solid crust. Alfred Wegener, who got his PhD in astronomy, and performed his research in meteorology, renounced ruling geological concept of sink bridges between continents and established theory of continental drift.
Milankovic and Wegener were very close collaborators since 1921. The aim of this paper is to find out why there is no single comparative study since now devoted to the work of two most prominent scientists whose research forced rewriting of all textbooks in the Earth sciences. Absence of such a study does not indicate lack of interest because there are quite a lot papers about each of them.
Trying to find answer striking similarities between biographies and scientific work of Milutin Milankovic and Alfred Wegener will be exposed. Especially it will be analyzed significance of the year 1912 when Milankovic published paper Mathematical theory of climate, where he started consistent transition from celestial mechanics to the Earth sciences and transformation of descriptive Earth sciences into exact ones, and Wegener delivered a lecture The Origin of Continents, postulating a new picture of the dynamic Earth. Paper considers that year annus mirabilis because Milankovic’s and Wegener’s contributions simultaneously have done for the Earth sciences what theory of evolution did for biology and Einstein’s theory for physics. It provides geology with a comprehensive perspective over Earth’s evolution, in both astronomical and terrestrial frame, and relativized geology by abandoning idea of unmovable continents which was remnant of old geocentric picture of the standstill cosmos-centered Earth.