Literally '
Pole escape' or '
Flight from the poles'.
Polflucht was a concept introduced by the German meterologist and physicist Alfred Wegener in 1915 as a partial explanation of continental drift. Wegener developed the hypothesis during his study of the supercontinent Pangea in the early 1900s.
Polflucht proposed that the continents were drifting away from the North and South poles and grouping together at the equator. This was attributed to a differential gravitational force called the Eötvös force: the force caused by the flattening of the Earth at the poles.
While the idea had merit, it has been found that Eötvös force is far too weak to allow continental drift. However, Wegener has found support in the modern community not for the idea of Polflucht but for the wide range of arguments he used to support his hypothesis, as well as the coherent and well-structured way in which he presented them.