Let’s cheer Lovecraft’s shout out to Wegener in At the Mountains of Madness.
“The changing state of the world through long geologic ages appeared with startling vividness in many of the sculptured maps and scenes. In certain cases existing science will require revision, while in other cases its bold deductions are magnificently confirmed. As I have said, the hypothesis of Taylor, Wegener, and Joly that all the continents are fragments of an original antarctic land mass which cracked from centrifugal force and drifted apart over a technically viscous lower surface—an hypothesis suggested by such things as the complementary outlines of Africa and South America, and the way the great mountain chains are rolled and shoved up—receives striking support from this uncanny source.” [Part VII]
Alfred Lothar Wegener published the theory of continental drift in 1915, in German. The first English edition, The Origin of Continents and Oceans, was published in 1924.
Wegener and Continental drift were not accepted readily. Wegener didn’t receive an accademic position until 1928 and was still actively defending the theory when he went on an arctic excursion in Greenland during November 1930. Wegener insisted on traveling onward during a storm where his Greenlander guides feared to tread. Naturally, the guides were right. Wegener died during the storm. Lovecraft wrote At the Mountains of Madness months later Jan-Feb 1931.
Not until the 1950s was Continental Drift widely accepted.