Polflucht is a geophysical concept invoked 1915 by Alfred Wegener

Alfred Wegener

Alfred Lothar Wegener was a German scientist, geophysicist, and meteorologist.He is most notable for his theory of continental drift , proposed in 1912, which hypothesized that the continents were slowly drifting around the Earth...

 to explain his ideas of Continental drift

Continental drift

Continental drift is the movement of the Earth's continents relative to each other. The hypothesis that continents 'drift' was first put forward by Abraham Ortelius in 1596 and was fully developed by Alfred Wegener in 1912...

. He suggested that a differential gravitational force (horizontal component of centrifugal or Eötvös force) and the Earth's flattening

Flattening

The flattening, ellipticity, or oblateness of an oblate spheroid is a measure of the "squashing" of the spheroid's pole, towards its equator...

 would cause continental masses to drift slowly towards the equator

Equator

An equator is the intersection of a sphere's surface with the plane perpendicular to the sphere's axis of rotation and containing the sphere's center of mass....

.

The hypothesis was expanded by Paul Sophus Epstein

Paul Sophus Epstein

Paul Sophus Epstein was a Russian-American mathematical physicist...

 in 1920 but the force is now known to be far too weak to cause plate tectonics

Plate tectonics

Plate tectonics is a scientific theory that describes the large scale motions of Earth's lithosphere...

. The toughness of the sublayers of the Earth's crust is much stronger than assumed by Wegener and Epstein.

Literature

• The concise Oxford dictionary of Earth Sciences (topic 'Polflucht'), Oxford 1990
• Laszlo Egyed
  László Egyed
  László Egyed , was a well known geophysicist from Hungary.He published over 100 scientific articles and 1956 the book Physics of the solid earth....
  
  : Physik der festen Erde (Physics of solid Earth), 368p. Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest 1969
• Über die Polflucht der Kontinente, F.Nölke 1921