Continental Drift

Wegener proposes idea of continental drift 1912 Ever since the continents were every(prenominal) mapped, people had notice that many coastlines, same(p) 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, ground on nineteenth-century longitude determinations, it appeared that Greenland had moved a mile away from europium in a hundred yrs. And Paris and Washington, D.C., seemed to be sorrowful asunder by about 15 feet each social class dapple San Diego and Shanghai got about six feet closer. On evanesce of that, Wegener wise to(p) that related species, too small to swim the oceans, were run on different continents, as were similar fossils. In 1912 he proposed that the continents we go through today were once all habituated in a single landmass he cal direct Pangaea (Greek for all earth). They were encircled by one global ocean, notwithstanding 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 another(prenominal) curtilage seemed to parallel up: the shape of the continents, fossil evidence, unified rock types and geological structures, and evidence of ancient climate patterns. only when Wegener could not begin up with an acceptable way to develop how the continents moved. Few people accepted Wegeners views in his day, moreov er they became the pith of heated debate. T! he year after Wegener died, Arthur Holmes published his idea that thermic 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 gibbosity 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: OrderCustomPaper.com

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