Evidence of techtonic Plates

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The evidence in the Theory of Plate Tectonics

In the 1900’s many scientists believed that the earth has and always had been cooling down since the “big bang” and that the earth’s surface contracted and wrinkled like the skin of a raisen. This “raisen” theory implied that mountain ranges and hills were once leveled to the ground but had been forced up by the ‘wrinkling process’.

This theory was later challenged by Alfred Wegener, a German geophysicist and meteorologist who was not satisfied by this explanation. His ideas drew on the widely recognized fact that the continent, Africa and South America appeared to fit together like jigsaw puzzle pieces. He soon collected data from the continents on both sides of the Atlantic, finding that many fossils and rock types along the eastern coast of South America matched those on the western coast of Africa!

This evidence caused Wegener to join the continents using a map and find an explanation.

When he added the northern continents to the puzzle, Wegener realized that the chain of Appalachian Mountains in North America continued as the Caledonian Mountains in northern Europe. After this he found evidence of the Permo-Carboniferous ice-age era that peaked some 280 million years agowhich was scattered over almost half the Earth, including the hottest deserts. On Alfred’s completed puzzle map, however, it clustered neatly around the South Pole because Africa, Antarctica, Australia, and India had once comprised a Southern Hemisphere supercontinent (Gondwanaland or now referred to as pangea).

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To explain this data, Wegener proposed the theory of continental drift in a book (he wrote to notify the public) called ‘The Origins of the Continents and the Oceans’, published in Germany in 1915. His book stated that all of the continents had originally been joined together in a supercontinent called Pangaea. About 200 million years ago, the book continued, Pangaea broke apart and the continents slowly drifted to their present positions.

His theory was not accepted, but in 1926 he was invited to an international symposium in New York called to discuss his theory. Though he found ...

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