The Shifting of Pangea :: essays research papers

The Shifting of Pangea absorb you ever noticed that a map of the world looks like a puzzle and the continents look like the pieces that would fit together to complete the puzzle. In 1912, Alfred Wegener, a German scientist and an adventurer, came up with a theory that the continents had at once been fracture of a supercontinent. Wegener proposed that, over 200 million years, what he called Pangea had sepa countd and became mortal pieces. Pangea means all lands in Greek, and that is what Pangea was, a very enceinte land mass when all of the continents were connected. When Wegener first proposed this idea in 1912, people did not buy into this theory. One of the problems that Wegener faced was that he believed that the continents had drifted apart, but he couldnt justify how they had drifted apart. Another problem was that there was a theory already in place called the Contraction Theory. This theory stated that the Earth was once a molten ball and in the process of cooling, the surface batty and folded up on itself. One of the problems with this theory was that it suggests that all mountain ranges were the kindred age, and this could not be true. Wegners explanation was that continents shifted and these shifting plates would collide, encounter guard from one another, compress, then fold upwards to form mountains near the edges of the plates. Eons agone India and an ancient maritime called the Tethys Ocean sat on a tectonic plate. This place was shifting northward towards Asia at a rate of 10 centimeters per year. The ocean got progressively smaller unit about 55 million years ago when it collided with Asia. There was no more ocean left of lubricate the subduction and so the plates formed the High Plateau of Tibet and the Himalayan Mountains. Evidence that Pangea may eat up existed can be found in land animal(prenominal)s, vegetation, mountains, and the climate. Fossils and plants that are the same, can be found on incompatible continents, across oce ans. Assuming that the land was once connected, animals could have walked across the large land mass and not have to swim. For example, the mesosauras (a land animal) could not have traveled from South America to Africa because of the Atlantic Ocean. Yet, there are fossils of this animal on both continents. Another example is there are trees in South America, Africa, India, Australia, and Antarctica that are of the same origin.