The Shaping of Today

THE PATTERNS of animal and plant life on the continents of the world have been partly caused by the movement of the continents over millions of years to their present position. It is only in this century that scientists realized that the continents had not always been where they are today. They have discovered that our planet is not covered by a thick solid crust that does not move. The land masses (the continents) move very, very slowly over the surface of the planet.

The man who first suggested the idea of continental drift, as the movement is called was a German named Alfred Wegener, who published the idea as a book in 1915. He showed that the continents on either side of the Atlantic Ocean fitted into one another almost exactly. The coast of North and South America and the coast of Europe and Africa are rather like two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. If the American continent was moved east to fit against Europe and Africa, mountain ranges of eastern North America would be connected with mountain ranges in western Europe. Fossils of a similar type have been found in South America and Africa.

It was realized later by scientists that the early plants of these two regions were similar, and that the same kinds of plants were also found in India, Australia and Antarctica. It is now believed that the five land masses were once all joined together in one super-continent, called Gondwanaland. The Ice Age of Gondwanaland suggests that the super-continent once lay near the South Pole, we now know that the whole are moved away from the South Pole. About 200 million years ago the continents as we recognize them today began to break away from each other.