How Did Alfred Wegener Support The Continental Drift

He was viewed as a meteorologist and not a geologist. With no real geological knowledge, he formulated the continental drift theory was due to tidal pull from the Sun or centrifugal force. Because scientists of the time couldn’t believe that continents could float through rock as if it were liquid. We now know that due to convection that we see through seismic tomography that the Earth is a kind of liquid on which the lithosphere is floating. His basis was partly due to the edges of the continents fit together as a puzzle. Also, rocks, plants, and animals that were spread across the globe must have started together because a rock didn’t swim to its new location.

Wegener also found some evidence for continental drift from fossils of plants and animals. The same type of plant/animal fossils are found on continents that are now far apart from each other. These Plants & Animals would not have been able to swim the oceans.

One line of evidence used to support continental drift is the discovery of similar fossils on different continents. Both fossil plants and animals found in India, South Africa, Australia, Antarctica, and South America are very similar. This supports the idea that the continents were once one because it suggests that the animals roamed the land, were fossilized where they were when they died, and then we discovered the fossils after the supercontinent had separated.

Alfred Wegener suggested that the continents have moved about the earth. Wegener carefully compiled evidence for continental drift that eventually became universally accepted in the scientific community. This lab also helped support the theory of continental drift. In this lab, we created a map of Earth 225 million years ago. This map indicates that South America, Africa, India, Antarctica, and Australia all used to be a part of a landmass called pangaea.

Divide the class into groups of four and have students list evidence that they believe would prove Alfred Wegener’s claim that hundreds of millions of years ago the continents were joined together, but have since separated.

Alfred Wegener claimed that the continents were very slowly drifting apart. The evidence that best supports Wegener’s claim is fossils found in a continent has the same fossil or fossils in the other nearest continent because a fossil can’t fly or swim across the ocean to get to another continent and bury itself. Another example of strong evidence for Continental drift is there are scratch marks from rocks scratching together in Africa and South America that line up exactly because this is a very extraordinary piece of evidence and why can scratches from Africa and South America line up exactly unless Continental Drift is true. The final piece of convincing evidence is the fit of continents, the fit of continents make the continents look like

Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace like so many of their predecessors made observations of natural phenomena that inspired proposals of how life on earth evolved, unlike others these men formed plausible explanations of how the changes in populations occurred without having any knowledge of Mendelian genetics which was presented in 1868, and provided the micro-mechanism for evolution that Darwin could never explain with his theory of Pangenesis. Rather, based solely on the observations each made over time observing different species of populations around the world, both men were able to pen the ideals that would serve as the foundation of the modern theory of evolution.

When asked how he came up with such a remarkable theory. He replied and said that he wrote a letter to his future wife saying "Doesn't the east coast of South America fit exactly against the west coast of Africa, as if they had once been joined? This is an idea I'll have to pursue." Shortly after this he came across scientific sheets promoting this theory that said they were once connected by a continent-sized land bridge that had since sunk into the sea. Fascinated by this he had done more research himself and came up with the theory of Continental Drift.

2. Hypothesis of continental drift and Pangaea: Alfred Wegener created the hypothesis of continental drift, stating about 220 million years ago all the land masses were combined to create Pangaea. The southern portion of the supercontinent was Gondwana, which Africa was the core of. Then as years passed the continents began to split apart and spread across the globe. As the tectonic plates move, earthquakes, volcanoes, mountains ranges, and other landforms were created. Because Africa was centralized in Pangaea, it gives ideas to the reason for the rift valleys, and lack of mountain ranges.

Alfred Wegener, a 20th century scientist proposed the Continental Drift Theory. His hypothesis proposed that the continents had once been joined as one super continent, and over time had drifted apart. Fossils of the same species of extinct plants and animals in rocks of the same age, but on continents that are now widely separated providing more evidence that these super continents once existed. This suggested that the continents could not have been in their current positions because the organisms would not have been able to travel across the oceans. For example, fossils of the seed fern Glossopteris are found across all of the southern continents. But the plants' seeds were too heavy to be carried across the ocean by wind. Mesosaurus fossils

Wegener was born on November 1, 1880. An influence for Wegener to create the Theory of Continental Drift was when he noticed in a textbook that the outlines at sea level were repeated at the two-hundred meter death contour. He thought that this was impossible since continents don’t just sink, and therefore formed the theory of

"Continental Drift" talks about the theory of plate tectonics, which states that the entire world was once a gigantic supercontinent which then drifted apart due to large continental and oceanic plates. These plates can move anywhere, taking whatever is on top of it with. Sir Francis Bacon first came up with this theory in the 17th century when he saw that the coasts of South America and Africa seemed to fit together. In 1912, Alfred Wegener proposed that we can from one continent he named Pangea.

Alfred Wegener was a German polar researcher, geophysicist, and meteorologist. During his lifetime he was mainly known for his achievement in meteorology, but after his death he is most remembered for his advancement of the idea of continental drift. In 1912 he theorized that the continents were slowly drifting around the earth. It was not until the 1950s though that his ideas were widely accepted. Numerous discoveries at that time, such as paleomagnetism provided strong support for his idea of continental drift. Wegener first thought of this idea by noticing that the landmasses of earth fit together like a jigsaw puzzle. The Continental shelf of the Americas fit closely to Africa and Europe, and Antarctica, India, Australia, and Madagascar fit next to the southern tip of Africa. Wegener closely analyzed either side of the Atlantic Ocean for rock type, geological structure, and fossils, and noticed a significant similarity between matching sides of the continents, specifically in plant fossils. Alfred

The remains and imprints of organisms found in earlier geological periods are still preserved in sedimentary rocks. These fossil records allow scientists to look through vast periods of time and attest to the fact that some species have transitional traits found in larger groups of organisms. This proves that species evolved from a distant ancestor and were not fixed there by God. Animals such as apes and the Archaeopteryx are evidence of the missing links and the gaps humanity has filled in the fossil records. They are also examples of transitional species that have tied different groups of species together through common traits and skeletal features. Fossil records also prove that single-celled organisms were succeeded by multi-celled organisms which ties back to Charles Darwin

Starting over 500 years ago with Nicolaus Copernicus, Galileo Galilei, Francis Bacon, and Isaac Newton paving the way for the possibility of new scientific exploration into studies such as “stratigraphy, the study of the rock and soil layers of the earth” by Robert Hooke and Carolus Linnaeus’ study of taxonomy, “the system of naming and classifying organisms” based on morphological similarities and differences, humanity would begin to uncrack the code of where life came from in a nonbiblical sense. (Fuentes, 26) Further studies by George-Louis Leclerc – Comte du Buffon, Erasmus Darwin (Charles’ grandfather), Georges Cuvier, James Hutton and Charles Lyell as well as Jean Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet – Chevalier de Lamarck’s studies in which he “correctly identified the environment as a challenge to organisms and adaptation as the result of changing to meet environmental challenges” helped prompt the formulation of the current understanding of evolution by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace each in their own special way.