Polflucht

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

Wegener and Epstein assumed that the continent blocks ( Sial ) of the earth's crust to move slowly floating on the underlying, more plastic Sima layer. However, the scientists was the isostatic phenomenon of " mountain roots " still unknown, according to which the earth's crust plunges more deeply into the mantle, the higher the mountains. The resulting additional resistance to movement can not overcome the pole-flight force adopted as the cause. The former assumptions about the plasticity of SiAl and SiMa proved to be inaccurate.

The current theory of plate tectonics, however, is taken as the cause of continental drift to slow changes in the Earth's mantle.

Literature and sources

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

• Plate tectonic