We explain what continental drift is, who devised the theory and what evidence exists today. Also, what is plate tectonics.
Continental drift is the gradual but constant displacement of the different continental masses of planet Earth with respect to the others, moving away or approaching in a cycle of millions of years.
It is due to the viscous and semi-solid nature of the earth’s layer underlying the surface lithosphere . On it float the different tectonic plates , pushing and moving reciprocally, like carpets on a waxed floor.
The current location of the continents is different from that suggested by the geological evidence of the fossil record. As an explanation for this difference, the continental drift theory was proposed in 1912 by the German geophysicist Alfred Wegener (1880-1930).
At the time the theory was received with skepticism by the geological community of the moment. However, in the 1960s, with the understanding of tectonic plates, the continental movement could be explained more adequately.
On the other hand, the idea that the shape of the continents fits together as puzzle pieces is not new. In the 19th century the German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt had already theorized about it.
About 50 years later, the French scientist Antonio Snider-Pellegrini concluded that the presence of the same fossil evidence on the coasts of continents as far away as Africa and America had only one explanation: that they had once been communicated, either physically or through land bridges that were now submerged.
The first complete explanation of this phenomenon came with Wegener, as well as the name of the supercontinent that all the current ones formed together: Pangea (from the Greek bread , “everything”, and gea , “earth”).
There are numerous tests of continental drift, such as:
Pangea was not the first supercontinent. Before there were others, which separated into pieces from which other supercontinents were formed, and so on until today. This process can be summarized in broad strokes in the following stages:
Today, Wegener’s theory constitutes an ancestor of what we understand as plate tectonics , a concept in which it is also included. The latter was formulated in 1960 by the studies of Robert Dietz, Bruce C. Heezen, Marie Tharp, Harry Hess, Maurice Ewing, Tuzo Wilson and others.
Plate tectonics explains the movement of the continents in the convection of the mantle of planet Earth , whose movements constantly reconfigure the upper and rigid layer, the lithosphere.
In this way, both the continental drift and the expansion of the ocean floor are the result of a long process, billions of years old, that mobilizes and confronts the fixed plates of the earth’s crust (tectonic plates), which can therefore present deformations, giving rise to the birth of the relief .
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