Continental Drift

Continental drift is the movement of the Earth's continents relative to each other, thus appearing to "drift" across the ocean bed. The speculation that continents might have 'drifted' was first put forward by Abraham Ortelius in 1596. The concept was independently and more fully developed by Alfred Wegener in 1912, but his theory was rejected by some for lack of a mechanism (though this was supplied later by Arthur Holmes) and others because of prior theoretical commitments. The idea of continental drift has been subsumed by the theory of plate tectonics, which explains how the continents move.

In 1858 Antonio Snider-Pellegrini created two maps demonstrating how the American and African continents might have once fit together.

Abraham Ortelius (Ortelius 1596), Theodor Christoph Lilienthal (1756),Alexander von Humboldt (1801 and 1845),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. W. J. Kious described Ortelius' thoughts in this way:

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]."

Writing in 1889, Alfred Russel Wallace remarks "It was formerly a very general belief, even amongst geologists, that the great features of the earth's surface, no less than the smaller ones, were subject to continual mutations, and that during the course of known geological time the continents and great oceans had again and again changed places with each other." He quotes Charles Lyell as saying "Continents, therefore, although permanent for whole geological epochs, shift their positions entirely in the course of ages" and claims that the first to throw doubt on this was James Dwight Dana in 1849.

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