What early evidence suggested that earths continents mights be moving?
Continental drift is the motion of the earth’s continents over geological time. Since the seventeenth century, cartographers have noticed the jigsaw-puzzle fit of the continental edges; in the nineteenth century, paleontologists discovered that some fossil plants and animals were extraordinarily similar across the globe. Some rock formations in distant continents were also surprisingly similar. To account for these similarities, Austrian geologist Eduard Suess proposed the theory of Gondwanaland—a giant supercontinental that had once covered the entire earth surface before breaking apart to form continents and ocean basins. In the early twentieth century, German meteorologist Alfred Wegener suggested an alternative explanation: continents drift. The paleontological patterns could be explained if the continents migrated, periodically joining together, periodically breaking apart. Continental drift was not accepted when first proposed, but in the 1960s it became a cornerstone of the theo
