MODERN LEARNING CENTER

OF IRIGA CITY
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Continental Drift Theory

Alfred Lothar Wegener, (was born on November 1, 1880, Berlin, Germany and died on
November 1930) a German meteorologist and geophysicist who formulated the first
complete statement of the continental drift hypothesis thought all the continents were
once joined together in an "Urkontinent" (German for "primal continent") 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 Ocean." For some reasons that Wegener didn't have a good model to
explain how the continents moved apart.

A map of the continents made Wegener's to explain the Earth's geologic history. As a
professional meteorologist, he was intrigued by the joint fit of Africa's and South America's
shorelines. Wegener tried to assembled an impressive amount of evidence to show that
Earth's continents were once connected in a single supercontinent - that now we know as
Pangea. When Wegener proposed the continental drift theory, many geologists were
against it. They thought Earth's incredible mountains were created because our planet was
cooling and shrinking on its formation. And to account for the found fossils on continents
such as Africa and South America, scientists invoked that there are ancient land bridges,
now vanished beneath the sea. Though most of Alfred 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.

Although Wegener's "continental drift" theory was somehow discarded, it introduces the
idea of moving continents to Geoscience. Decades later, scientists finally confirm some of
Wegener's ideas, such as the past existence of a supercontinent joining all the world's
landmasses as one. Pangea, was a supercontinent that is said to formed early 200 to 250 million
years ago, according to the U.S Geological Survey (USGS) and was responsible for the fossil and
rock clues that led Wegener to the Continental Drift Theory. Alfred Wegener hypothesis was
controversial and widely rejected by mainstream geology until the 1950s, when numerous
discoveries such as paleomagnetism provided strong support for continental drift, and thereby a
substantial basis for today's model of plate tectonics. He brought ideas to geoscientists that now
bought us some information's about our world geological history.

By: Camille Camila Salvadora Submitted to: Charity Bicaldo

Grade 10 student Science Teacher