The comparison of continental coastline geometries, rock types and patterns, fossils, and glacial formations across oceans that encouraged the continental drift hypothesis.
This map displays a simplified view of the early supercontinent Gondwana. During the time of Gondwana, present-day continents were geographically assembled like a jigsaw puzzle. Continental deformation such as mountain chains, glacial erosion patterns, and the distribution of plants and animals left their marks across the entire supercontinent. When it eventually split up, at around 180 Million years ago, some of these marks were preserved in the geologic record of the dispersed present-day continents.
Geologists, amongst which Antonio Snider-Pellegrini and Alfred Wegener, realised that some of the fossils of similar organisms matched across the present-day continents and encouraged the revolutionary theory of continental drift. Continental drift describes one of the earliest ways geologists thought continents moved over time. More than fifty years later, this theory evolved into the concept of Ocean-plate tectonics, that describes the plate motion at the Earth’s surface as the uppermost dynamic part of mantle convection, the overturn of Earth’s solid but viscous silicate mantle.
The typeface ‚Fufu‘ by Lucia Perez-Diaz is used.
- Creator: Fabio Crameri
- Original version: 13.10.2024
- This version: 15.10.2024
- License: Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0)
- Specific citation: This graphic by Fabio Crameri adopted from an original version by the USGS is available via the open-access s-ink.org repository.
- Related reference: –
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