jan 1, 1912 - Theory of Continental Drift

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The theory of continental drift was a way to explain how different fossils and other natural resources like coal and rocks were scattered across the earth. The theory stated that all the continents were all combined into a super continent about 270 million years ago, and that all the continents started to break away about 200 million years ago. To prove this Alfred Wegener presented a multitude of evidence, some of the evidence included fossils, mountain ranges, and glacier deposits. Additionally, the fossil evidence he presented was that many of the same species were found on different continents, and he observed that this stopped after when Pangaea was presumed to have split. Next, another piece of evidence that Wegener proposed was that many mountain ranges seem to be part of one, the most obvious of these examples is that there is a long mountain range on the west coast of North America that stretches all the to the southern tip of South America. Finally, he observed that there were glacier deposits in many different countries and places like Africa, Australia, South America, and India, and that the glaciers seemed to be moving in different directions, so he proposed that the glaciers originated from Antartica and moved to the continents that surrouneded it.

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