Polflucht (from German, flight from the poles) is a geophysical concept invoked in 1922 by Alfred Wegener to explain his ideas of continental drift.
The resulting Polfluchtkraft was postulated by the German geologist Damian Kreichgauer in 1902 and the Hungarian physicist Loránd Eötvös in 1912.
Around 1920 Alfred Wegener postulated the pole flight of the continents and suspected that the centrifugal force was the cause of continental drift hypothesized by him and others.
Wegener suggested that the differential gravitational force resulting from the horizontal component of the centrifugal could cause continental masses to drift slowly towards the equator.
Wegener's hypothesis was expanded by Paul Sophus Epstein in 1920, but the force is now known to be far too weak to cause plate tectonics.