The Thrilling Theory of Continental Drift

I remember a long time ago when I was a kid, I first read about "plate tectonics". The way the earth's land masses were always moving a tiny bit over millions and millions of years. And still continues to move. The movement is both vertical and horizontal several inches per year A fact first presented by geophysicists in the 1960's. It fascinated me then and still does today. As a child I pictured a plate sliding across the surface of a table, in the earth's case the plate was the earth's crust including land and oceans and even the ice-caps. My then pre-teen mind reeled with sci-fi scenarios. I imagined that were all floating on a thin layer of earth and the world below the ground could swallow us up on a whim of the gods. Yeah, I had a real wild imagination back then in 1975.

It was a relatively new idea being taught to us, but it had been around in the scientific circles for many years under the guise of the Theory of Continental Drift. First proposed by Frank Taylor and Alfred Wegener in 1912 that the earth had only one giant continent about 200 million years ago and that this continent slowly broke apart and the pieces gradually drifted further away from each other and still are. The theory shows how the continents seem to fit together, and how the distribution of fossils of the same animals appear on different continents separated by miles of ocean. It explains how similar sequences of rocks at numerous locations appeared, ancient climates, and the apparent wobbling of the Earth's polar regions. I remember looking at a map of the world and picturing how the continents looked as if they were pieces of one giant super-continent. It wasn't hard too see how the bulge of Africa fits the North American coast and how South America fits along the lower part of Africa.