100th birthday - Austria / II. Republic of Austria 1980 - 4 Shilling

Alfred Wegener, the founder of continental drift theory, was born on November 1, 1880 in Berlin. Although Wegener was not the first to suggest, from the obvious parallelism of the South American and African coasts, that the two continents must have been together earlier, he deduced from this observation a general geological history of education. To support it, he drew numerous other geological and geophysical findings. Thus Wegener not only explained the drifting apart of the continents of Africa and America, but also found surprisingly simple explanations for hitherto enigmatic geological findings, such as: As the ice ages in geological antiquity in the southern hemisphere. The route to this scientific knowledge has been through a series of expeditions he has undertaken to Greenland, with seismic ice thickness measurements being taken alongside meterological measurements for the first time. In the course of his last expeditions in 1930 he died. His body was found in the spring of 1931 in the ice.