Evidence Supporting

Continental Drift
Group 5
EVIDENCES
Geological “fit”
evidence
•The continents look as if they
were pieces of a giant jigsaw
puzzle that could fit together to
make one giant super-continent.
•As seen on the image in the right,
the terrains of the continents
match almost perfectly.
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Fossil Relevance
• There are various examples of fossils found
on separate continents and in no other
regions. This indicates that these continents
had to be once joined together because the
extensive oceans between these land
masses act as a type of barrier for fossil
transfer.
• This suggests that they evolved together on a
single large land mass..
• He reasoned that it was physically
impossible for most of these organisms to
have traveled or have been transported
across the vast ocean.
Sequence of Rocks
•Rocks on some continents match.
•Broad belts of rocks in Africa and
South America are the same type.
These broad belts then match
when the end of the continents
are joined.
•Same rock patterns found in
South America, India, Africa,
Antarctica and Australia
 Ice on several
continents match
• Wegener was aware that a
continental ice sheet covered parts
of South America, southern Africa,
India, and southern Australia about
300 million years ago.
• Pangaea with S. Africa centered
over the South Pole accounts for
glacial ice in the southern
continents.
• Regions with areas with extensive
coal deposits from the same time
period would have been near the
Equator.
Sea-floor spreading is
still currently happening
• Sea-floor spreading is the process in
which the ocean floor is extended
when two plates move apart. As the
plates move apart, the rocks break
and form a crack between the plates.
• Earthquakes occur along the plate
boundary. Magma rises through the
cracks and seeps out onto the ocean
floor like a long, thin, undersea
volcano.
• As magma piles up along the crack, a
long chain of mountains forms
gradually on the ocean floor. This
chain is called an oceanic ridge