Schools, streets, foundations, research institutes, and even a moon crater bear his name. Rightly so: when it came to the thirst for knowledge and daring, the physicist, meteorologist, and astronomer Alfred Wegener, born in Berlin in 1880, was in no way inferior to adventurers like Amundsen, Scott, and others. He set spectacular long-duration records in ballooning, and during the longest crossing of Greenland up to that point, he narrowly escaped death from starvation. With his brilliant idea of continental drift, he laid the foundation for the theory of plate tectonics, even in a discipline that was not even his own. He died in 1930 on the inland ice of Greenland—having attempted to reach the coast on skis to conserve the supplies of the scientists who were wintering in a research station in the middle of the ice.