Continental drift

Frank Bursley Taylor had proposed the concept in a Geological Society of America meeting in 1908 and published his work in the GSA Bulletin in June 1910. Abraham Ortelius, Francis Bacon, Antonio Snider-Pellegrini, Benjamin Franklin, and others had noted earlier that the shapes of continents on either side of the Atlantic Ocean (most notably, Africa and South America) seem to fit together. The similarity of southern continent fossil faunae and some geological formations had led a small number of Southern hemisphere geologists to conjecture as early as 1900citation needed] that all the continents had once been joined into a supercontinent (now known as Pangaea). Frank Bursley Taylor suggested that the continents were dragged towards the equator by increased lunar gravity during the Cretaceous, thus forming the Himalaya and Alps on the southern faces.

Alfred Wegener was the first to use the phrase "continental drift" (in German "die Verschiebung der Kontinente") and formally publish the hypothesis that the continents had somehow "drifted" apart. However, he was unable to provide a convincing explanation for the physical processes which might have caused this drift. His suggestion that the continents had been pulled apart by the centrifugal pseudoforce of the Earth's rotation was considered unrealistic by the scientific community.

The hypothesis received support through the controversial years from South African geologist Alexander Du Toit as well as from Arthur Holmes. The idea of continental drift did not become widely accepted even as theory until the late 1950s. By the 1960s, geological research conducted by Robert S. Dietz, Bruce Heezen, and Harry Hess, along with a rekindling of the theory including a mechanism by J. Tuzo Wilson led to widespread acceptance of the theory among geologists.

The hypothesis of continental drift became part of the larger theory of plate tectonics. This article deals mainly with the historical development of the continental drift hypothesis before 1950 . See plate tectonics for information on current ideas underlying concepts of continental drift.