Continental drift — what exactly is it?
Why do some continents look like matching puzzles on a world map? It was Alfred Wegener who first deduced that the continents once formed a supercontinent — Pangea.
One man went up against a world of august scientists. In January 1912, a remarkable spectacle took place at the annual meeting of the German Geological Society in Frankfurt am Main. The 31-year-old meteorologist Alfred Wegener delivered a lecture that shook the foundations of previous knowledge.
He first presented the theory of the drift of the continents, that is, the movement of the continents relative to each other and to the Earth’s axis of rotation. Some of the professors mercilessly laughed at the young colleague, convinced that the position of the continents never changed.
What was the name of the first continent?
The concept of the drift of the continents was born on Christmas Day 1910, when Alfred Wegener was looking through a friend’s atlas. Others before him had noticed that the Atlantic coast of Brazil looked as if it had once been connected to West Africa “like a couple lying on a bed.” But for Wegener, this fact became the beginning of a bold scientific theory remember as the wandering of the continents. He believed that some force was pushing the continents and therefore they moved away from each…
