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. However, it was not until the development of the theory of plate tectonics in the 1960s, that a sufficientgeological explanation of that movement was found.

|Contents |
| [hide] |
|1 History |
|1.1 Early history |
|1.2 Wegener and his predecessors |
|2 Evidence that continents 'drift ' |
|3 Rejection of Wegener 's theory |
|4 Bibliography |
|5 External links |

[edit]History

Main article: Timeline of the development of tectonophysics

[edit]Early history
Abraham Ortelius (Ortelius 1596),[1] Theodor Christoph Lilienthal (1756),[2] Alexander von Humboldt (1801 and 1845),[2] Antonio Snider-Pellegrini (Snider-Pellegrini 1858), and others had noted earlier that the shapes of continents on opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean (most notably, Africa and South America) seem to fit together.[3] W. J. Kious described Ortelius ' thoughts in this way:[4]

Abraham Ortelius in his work Thesaurus Geographicus ... suggested that the Americas were "torn away from Europe and Africa ... by earthquakes and floods" and went on to say: "The vestiges of the rupture reveal themselves, if someone brings forward a map of the world and considers carefully the coasts of the three [continents]."
[edit]Wegener and his predecessors
The hypothesis that the continents had once formed a single landmass before breaking apart and drifting to their present locations was fully formulated by Alfred Wegener in 1912.[5] Although Wegener 's theory was formed independently and

Bibliography: Mesosaurus skeleton, MacGregor, 1908.