Like Snider-Pellegrini, Wegener first conceived of continental drift by noting the visual match between the shapes of the continents, particularly South America’s eastern coast and Africa’s western coast. sedimentary rocks that indicated paleo-latitude.Marshalling evidence for this audacious idea, Wegener compiled evidence of several varieties: He is the person most associated with a full-throated articulation of the idea of continental drift. According to Wegener, since the early Mesozoic, Pangaea’s various pieces have been drifting away from one another, with the Atlantic Ocean opening up in between.
In it, he postulated the existence of a supercontinent he called Pangaea which existed in the late Paleozoic Era. German meteorologist Alfred Wegener compiled evidence for continental movement through time, first sharing these ideas in a 1912 talk and then later publishing a 1915 German book called Die Entstehung der Kontinente und Ozeane (‘The Origin of Continents and Oceans’). These lines of evidence would also be invoked by Alfred Wegener.Ĭontinental drift The 1966 English translation of Wegener’s 1915 book. Their shapes were so similar, he suggested that they may have been “torn away… by earthquakes and floods.”Īlmost 300 years later, in 1858, Antonio Snider-Pellegrini published his hypothesis of continental drift, using the shapes of the continents as his primary line of evidence, but also citing similar terrestrial fossils on widely separated continents. In 1596, he mused on the shapes of the Atlantic coastlines of the Americas, Europe and Africa. The earliest mention of what could later be called continental drift appears to have been Abraham Ortelius. A particular prompt came from the mapping of the world’s landmasses as a consequence of the “Age of Exploration.” (That’s a Eurocentric phrase if ever there was one! Sometimes this is called the “Age of Being Explored by Europeans,” since that is how most of the world’s population experienced it.) Once the shapes of other continents were documented, they could be contemplated. Yet various lines of evidence did suggest the notion to various thinkers in the European scientific tradition. Prior to the invention of satellite-based telemetry ( GPS), there was not discernible way to directly measure such a thing. The idea that continents can move is a rather audacious notion to emerge in the mind of an human who lives such a short life. Antecedents Antonio Snider-Pellegrini’s hypothesis of continental drift in 1858, showing the first graphical depiction of the opening of the Atlantic. Fifty years of additional data and testing have confirmed plate tectonics as thekey idea in modern geology. The new theory was a revolutionary explanation that made the distribution of volcanoes, earthquakes, continents, and topography make sense in a way that no idea had achieved before.
The idea of “plate tectonics” put together old ideas about continental drift with new data showing seafloor spreading. This prompted a fresh look at crustal dynamics, and in the late 1960s and early 1970s, geoscientific consensus gelled around the idea that many different observations about our planet could be explained with a single model. A separate chapter outlines a modern treatment of plate tectonics.Īfter sputtering suggestions of continental movement in the previous 150 years (most notably in 1915), new information about the seafloor between the continents was revealed in the aftermath of World War II’s naval battles.
In this case study, we examine the historical development of this important idea. Plate tectonics is an overarching paradigm that explains a lot of independent observations about Earth surface dynamics.
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