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Evidence for continental drift bbc bitesize
The impact of the continental drift
Essay note on continental drift
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Alfred Wegener was right about the moving of the continents. His discovery was true because our new technology has gone down into the ocean to map the seafloor. Also, we can use satellite images to see how the continents are moving and at what rate they are moving per year. The shapes and other details give evidence that the continents had to have once been together. Even though every scientist on earth thought he was wrong, they were the ones that were wrong.
One way we can tell that the continents moved a long time ago is by the mountain chains forming on plate boundaries. As the plates are subducted or push alongside each other, they form mountains or volcanoes above and below the ocean surface. We can find out the plate boundaries by
The continents are moving around because of the new rock forming and spreading at the mid-atlantic ridge. The molten rock pushes up from the crack in the earth and cools in a repetitive process. As the new rock forms it has to push away the old rock, causing sea-floor spreading.
Another piece of evidence is that the same fossil remnants are found on two different continents. It couldn’t be just a coincident that the same thing is found on two different land masses thousands of miles apart. They matched up the sections where animals or plants were found and they fit together on different continents.
The fourth piece of evidence is from the way continents fit together like a puzzle piece. The continental shelfs line up almost perfectly in most places. The continental shelf is where the land drops down steeply. It wouldn’t be a coincident that South America fits perfectly into Africa. Or that australia fits into the bottom of Asia. They had to have started together in one continent.
The final explanation for Wegener’s theory is glacial remnants. Glacial debris is found by the equator in some places, which if the continent was there all along it would be impossible for a glacier to have been there. The continent had to have once been at the north or south pole for there to be glacier
15. The pictures above show how the continents on Earth’s surface have changed position over a very long period of time. What explains this change? (S6E5e, f)
To set the stage, we must go back 270 million years ago when a majority of the earth’s land masses were collected together in a single continent, a supercontinent, named Pangaea (Encyclopedia Britannica, 1). Historian Alfred Crosby explained that this collected all of earth’s land based biology into a single place, creating a single Darwinian “arena for competition” (Crosby, 1). Or in other words, one big evolutionary pot. Crosby also explains that 180 million years ago, Pangea split into two major land masses, what is now the Americas in the Western Hemisphere as one land mass and Euro-Asia and Africa as the second lass mass (Crosby, 1). What was once a single evolutionary pot, was now two, allowing for plant and animal life to take different evolutionary paths. These two worlds remained relatively separate from each other until the arrival of Christopher Columbus and other European explorers. That contact between the old world and the new world brought two distinct evolutionary arenas crashing into each other and returned a majority of the earth’s landmass into a single Darwinian pot, (Crosby, 1) This was Crosby’s re-knitting of the torn “seams of Pangaea.”
The Rocky Mountains were created by the Laramide orogeny, which began roughly 75 million years ago (Connor and Harrison 10). In the paleographic map below it shows the oceans wand where all the landmasses were during this time (DeMets). This can possible give one a better perspective as to what was going on, through out the rest of this process. Most mountains are created by plate boundaries. Either by continental collisions, or subduction zones at plate boundaries usually create mountains. The Rocky Mountains were not, though. These mountains were formed away from plate bo...
In 1952 W. F. Libby discovered a new method for calculating the age of organic material. Many people have been led to believe that carbon dating (and other radioactive dating methods) prove the Earth to be much older that 6000 years old (Biblical age).
...misphere. Evidence obtained from fossils in modern day laboratories are much more accurate, and only add to the possibility that Wegener’s theory was indeed correct. While during his lifetime, he was primarily known for his work in meteorology and polar exploration, it is his Continental Drift Theory that will make him remembered for all time.
There is much evidence of population evolution. Some evidence they found of population evolution are fossils. Fossils are historical records. Over millions of years ago land eroded and was carried away by rivers and ended up in the bottoms of oceans compressing older deposits into the rock. Dead organisms settled along the
People began to wonder what was on the other side of the Atlantic and pacific oceans. Soon discovering new worlds that expanded trade of not only resources but of also arts, ideas, inventions and clothes, new resources as well as materials that had never been used on the European continent, or vise versa in the Asian continent or what later was known as the Americas. Also with the discovery of new lands across oceans, astronomers and mathematicians also discovered a whole new universe in the sky. They discovered that the Earth was indeed not the center of the universe but that instead it was the sun and that with the earth many other planets revolved around
Rock formations on continents across the atlantic ocean were found to acquire similarities. The Appalachian Mountains in the United States share similar features with rocks in Greenland and Europe. These mountain ranges were formed 200 million years ago which support the theory that the continents were once joined. These structures were at one time connected, sharing a common land due to the similar ages, formation of Earth’s crust and type of rock. It is due to the drift of these continents that now the rock formations and common geological structures are presently separated across
Another question that arises regarding this is why was the public and the English scientists so willing to accept this discovery for so long? Some believe it is because the Europeans were so willing to accept the fact that their land was the origin of humankind. They did not like having another country possessing the origin of humankind and because they found this, it gave them a reason to believe that their land, in fact, was where humans originated. Though there was little evidence to prove this, the Europeans did not need it to believe the Piltdown
Evidence that Pangea may have existed can be found in land animals, vegetation, mountains, and the climate. Fossils and plants that are the same, can be found on different continents, across oceans. 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.
First you might need to know definition of tectonics. It is a theory in geology. The lithosphere of the Earth is divided into a small number of plates which float on and travel independently over the mantle and much of the Earth’s seismic activity occurs at the boundaries of these plates. That is the official definition of Plate tectonics. secondly, this plate covers many parts of continents. plate boundaries don’t go according to Continents boundaries, they make their own boundaries. The North American plat...
There is also information presented in the ways that we can study the earth and what is left on our earth that explain evolution in a way that I feel like is undeniable. Examples of evolution can be seen in fossils, of layers deposited on the earth, of radiometric dating, and the Mid-Atlantic ridge. All of these different evidences lead us to believe in an old earth. A earth that has been around roughly 6.5 billion years and has changed and grown while preserving sight into our
The proof of pangaea are the fossils found on the continents. The same species of fossils are found in different continents that are across the ocean. Some of them are land animals unable to swim across the Atlantic or Pacific ocean. Those species also evolved at the same pace. This suggests that those continents used to be close together,
Continental drift is the theory that the continents moved or split into smaller continents that we have today. That is the reason we think is that we find plant and animal fossils that originated and lived in different continents are found on the other side of the world than were we thought they lived.
The interior structure of the earth is made up of crust, the mantle and core (inner core and outer core). Earthquakes occur on the crust. Crust forms the external layer of the earth surface. On the crust, the plate tectonics forces are in charge of causing the abrupt earth movements. Due to the existence of an immense temperature and concurrent pressure difference in the outer layer and inner layer of the earth, convection currents occur at the mantle. This energy results from overwhelming decomposition of radioactive substances contained by the rocks found at the interior of the earth. The developed convection currents lead to movement of lava; cold lava finds its way to the interior of the earth crust, while the molten lava which is generally hot, leaves the interior of the earth to the outside of the earth crust. These kinds of circulations occur at different locations of the earth surface and consequently results in segmentation of the earth due to movement in different directions.