Whose theory first explained the global movement of Earth’s lithospheric plates?

Alfred Wegener, a German meteorologist and polar researcher, proposed that continents were once joined in a supercontinent called Pangaea. In 1912 and later in his 1915 book, he assembled evidence from matching coastlines, fossils, and rock layers on different continents. Wegener did not fully explain the driving force, which is why his idea was initially rejected. Decades later, seafloor spreading and paleomagnetism turned his basic insight into the modern theory of plate tectonics.