Continental Drift

Wegener proposes idea of continental drift
1912
Ever since the continents were all mapped, population had notice that many coastlines, like those of South America and Africa, looked as though they would fit to furbish upher if they could be moved like acquire pieces.
Alfred Wegener was one of those people. Though trained as an astronomer, he was a specialist on Greenland. He noticed that, based on nineteenth-century longitude determinations, it appeared that Greenland had moved a mile away from Europe in a hundred yrs. And Paris and Washington, D.C., seemed to be moving asunder by about 15 feet each year dapple San Diego and Shanghai got about six feet closer. On top of that, Wegener wise to(p) that related species, too small to swim the oceans, were pitch on different continents, as were similar fossils.
In 1912 he proposed that the continents we go through today were once all attached in a single landmass he called Pangaea (Greek for all earth). They were encircled by one global ocean, but then stony-broke apart and somehow drifted to their separate places on the globe.



Although the calculations of Greenlands movement were found to be due to faulty determinations of longitude, the other curtilage seemed to parallel up: the shape of the continents, fossil evidence, matching rock types and geological structures, and evidence of ancient climate patterns. But Wegener could not begin up with an acceptable way to explain how the continents moved.
Few people accepted Wegeners views in his day, but they became the center of heated debate. The year after Wegener died, Arthur Holmes published his idea that thermal convection in the earths diffuse could cause continents to move. Holmes also suggested that the continents didnt move but were carried by bigger pieces of the earths crust. The controversy quieted down and fell from prominence until the 1960s, when new evidence was brought to the fore. Discoveries of the Mid-Ocean Ridge and the work of Harry Hess and others led to the development...If you want to get a full essay, order it on our website: Orderessay



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