Alfred Wegener was born in Berlin in 1880, where his father was a minister who ran

an orphanage. From an early age he took an interest in Greenland, and always

walked, skated, and hiked as though training for an expedition. He studied in
Germany and Austria, receiving his PhD in astronomy. But no sooner did he finish his
dissertation than he dropped astronomy to study meteorology, the new science of
weather.
Wegener experimented with kites and balloons, and with his brother Kurt set a world
record in an international balloon contest, flying 52 hours straight. That was in
1906, the year he made his first expedition to Greenland. He went as the official
meteorologist on a two-year Danish expedition. When he returned he took up
teaching meteorology at the University of Marburg, where he was a very popular
lecturer.
In 1910, Wegener noticed the matching coastlines of the Atlantic continents -- they
looked on maps like they had once been fit together. He was not the first to notice
this, but it was an idea that would never leave his thoughts. In 1911, he published a
textbook on the thermodynamics of atmosphere, but at the same time he pursued
his studies of the continents. He first spoke on the topic in January of 1912, where
he put forth the idea of "continental displacement" or what later was
called continental drift. The year 1912 was busy for Wegener: he got married (to the
daughter of Germany's leading meteorologist) and he returned to Greenland,
making the longest crossing of the ice cap ever made on foot.
Though he served in World War I and was wounded twice, he published his ideas in
1915. They constituted the first focused and rational argument for continental drift,
but still they veered radically from the accepted beliefs of the time. Some scientists
supported him. Still more scientists opposed him -- including his father-in-law, who
seemed annoyed that Wegener had strayed from meteorology into the unknown
territory of geophysics. The established reputation of many of his detractors
probably gave more weight to their criticisms than was merited. Wegener often
complained of their narrow-mindedness.
In 1926 Wegener was finally offered a professorship in meteorology. In 1930 he
sailed from Denmark as the leader of a major expedition to Greenland -- his fourth
and last. He celebrated his fiftieth birthday on November 1, but shortly afterwards
the team got separated, and he was lost in a blizzard. His body was found halfway
between the two camps.
Well after his death, and after World War II, Wegener's theories were vindicated by
the work of Harry Hess and others. In 1960 Hess proposed the mechanism of seafloor spreading, which would explain how the continents moved. Newly discovered
exporation techniques were employed to prove this theory and ultimately, the
correctness of Wegener's chief idea as well.
CONTINENTAL DRIFT
Continental drift was a theory that explained how continents shift position on
Earth's surface. Set forth in 1912 by Alfred Wegener, a geophysicist and
meteorologist, continental drift also explained why look-alike animal and plant
fossils, and similar rock formations, are found on different continents.
Wegener thought all the continents were once joined together in an "Urkontinent"
before breaking up and drifting to their current positions. But geologists soundly
denounced Wegener's theory of continental drift after he published the details in a
1915 book called "The Origin of Continents and Oceans." Part of the opposition was

because Wegener didn't have a good model to explain how the continents moved
apart.
Though most of Wegener's observations about fossils and rocks were correct, he
was outlandishly wrong on a couple of key points. For instance, Wegener thought
the continents might have plowed through the ocean crust like icebreakers
smashing through ice.
PANGAEA
More than a century ago, the scientist Alfred Wegener proposed the notion of an
ancient supercontinent, which he named Pangaea (sometimes spelled Pangea),
after putting together several lines of evidence.
The first and most obvious was that the "continents fit together like a tongue and
groove," something that was quite noticeable on any accurate map, Murphy said.
Another telltale hint that Earth's continents were all one land mass comes from the
geologic record. Coal deposits found in Pennsylvania have a similar composition to
those spanning across Poland, Great Britain and Germany from the same time
period. That indicates that North America and Europe must have once been a single
landmass. And the orientation of magnetic minerals in geologic sediments reveals
how Earth's magnetic poles migrated over geologic time, Murphy said.
In the fossil record, identical plants, such as the extinct seed fernGlossopteris, are
found on now widely disparate continents. And mountain chains that now lie on
different continents, such as the Appalachians in the United States and the Atlas
Mountains in Morocco, were all part of the Central Pangaea Mountains, formed
through the collision of the supercontinents Gondwana and Laurussia.
Pangaea formed through a gradual process spanning a few hundred million years.
Beginning about 480 million years ago, a continent called Laurentia, which includes
parts of North America, merged with several other micro-continents to form
Euramerica. Euramerica eventually collided with Gondwana, another supercontinent
that included Africa, Australia, South America and the Indian subcontinent.
About 200 million years ago, the supercontinent began to break
up.Gondwana (what is now Africa, South America, Antarctica, India and Australia)
first split from Laurasia (Eurasia and North America). Then about 150 million years
ago, Gondwana broke up. India peeled off from Antarctica, and Africa and South
America rifted, according to a 1970 article in the Journal of Geophysical Research.
Around 60 million years ago, North America split off from Eurasia.
PLATE TECTONICS
Plate tectonics is the theory that Earth's outer shell is divided into several plates
that glide over the mantle, the rocky inner layer above the core. The plates act like
a hard and rigid shell compared to Earth's mantle. This strong outer layer is called
the lithosphere.
Developed from the 1950s through the 1970s, plate tectonics is the modern version
of continental drift, a theory first proposed by scientist Alfred Wegener in 1912.
Wegener didn't have an explanation for how continents could move around the
planet, but researchers do now. Plate tectonics is the unifying theory of geology,
said Nicholas van der Elst, a seismologist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty
Earth Observatory in Palisades, New York.
FOSSIL EVIDENCES

Remains of Mesosaurus, a freshwater crocodile-like reptile that lived during the

early Permian (between 286 and 258 million years ago), are found solely in
Southern Africa and Eastern South America. It would have been physiologically
impossible for Mesosaurus to swim between the continents. This suggests that
South America and Africa were joined during the Early Permian.
Cynognathus is an extinct mammal-like reptile. The name literally means dog jaw.
Cynognathus was as large as a modern wolf and lived during the early to mid
Triassic period (250 to 240 million years ago). It is found as fossils only in South
Africa and South America.
Lystrosaurus - which literally means shovel reptile - was dominant on land in the
early Triassic, 250 million years ago. It is thought to have been herbivorous and
grew to approximately one metre in length, with a stocky build like a pig. Fossils of
Lystrosaurus are only found in Antarctica, India and South Africa.
Glossopteris was a woody, seed-bearing shrub or tree, named after the Greek
descripton of tongue a description of the shape of the leaves. Some reached 30m
tall. It evolved during the Early Permian (299 million years ago) and went on to
become the dominant species throughout the period, not becoming extinct until the
end of the Permian. Fossils are found in Australia, South Africa,South America, India
and Antarctica.
When the continents of the southern hemisphere are re-assembled into the single
land mass of Gondwanaland, the distribution of these four fossil types form linear
and continuous patterns of distribution across continental boundaries.

HENRY HAMMOND HESS

Harry Hess was a professor of geology at Princeton University (USA), and became
interested in the geology of the oceans while serving in the US Navy in World War II.
His time as a Navy officer was an opportunity to use sonar(also called echo
sounding), then a new technology, to map the ocean floor across the North Pacific.
He published The History of Ocean Basins' in 1962, in which he outlined a
theory that could explain how the continents could actually drift. This theory later
became known as Sea Floor Spreading'.
Hess discovered that the oceans were shallower in the middle and identified the
presence of Mid Ocean Ridges, raised above the surrounding generally flat sea
floor (abyssal plain) by as much as 1.5 km. In addition he found that the deepest
parts of the oceans were very close to continental margins in the Pacific with Ocean
Trenches extending down to depths of over 11 km in the case of the Marianas
Trench off the coast of Japan.
Hess envisaged that oceans grew from their centres, with molten material (basalt)
oozing up from the Earths mantle along the mid ocean ridges. This created new
seafloor which then spread away from the ridge in both directions. The ocean ridge

was thermally expanded and consequently higher than the ocean floor further away.
As spreading continued, the older ocean floor cooled and subsided to the level of
the abyssal plain which is approximately 4 km deep.
Hess believed that ocean trenches were the locations where ocean floor was
destroyed and recycled.
Although his theory made sense, Hess knew, like Wegener, that he still needed
convincing geophysical evidence to support it. This was to come just a year after his
1962 publication...
SEA FLOOR SPREADING
Seafloor spreading is a geologic process in which tectonic plateslarge slabs of
Earth's lithospheresplit apart from each other.
Seafloor spreading and other tectonic activity processes are the result of mantle
convection. Mantle convection is the slow,churning motion of
Earths mantle. Convection currents carry heat from the lower mantle and core to
the lithosphere. Convection currents also recycle lithospheric materials back to
the mantle.
Seafloor spreading occurs at divergent plate boundaries. As tectonic plates slowly
move away from each other, heat from the mantles convection currents makes
the crust more plastic and less dense. The less-dense material rises, often forming a
mountain or elevated area of the seafloor.
Eventually, the crust cracks. Hot magma fueled by mantle convection bubbles up to
fill these fractures and spills onto the crust. This bubbled-up magma is cooled
by frigid seawater to form igneous rock. This rock (basalt) becomes a new part of
Earths crust.