![]() ![]() The continents are all part of pieces of earth, which are 80 to 400 miles thick. When scientists studied the earth's crust, they found it was made up of giant plates. It was not until after Wegener died seventy years ago that people saw that he was right. This idea was so big and so different that no one believed him. The name means "all the land." He came up with the idea that one hundred and thirty million years ago, it broke apart like the graham cracker in milk. Pangea is the name Wegener gave to the great piece of land that held all of the continents together as one. It's only when that land broke up and floated apart that the animals started to change and look a lot different. What does this mean? It meant that all animals, plants, and everything we can see came from the same big piece of land. Over time, the land must have separated and drifted apart, taking the living things on them along too. This helped him come up with the fit of the continents, which is the idea that all the continents must have all been touching at one point. He found that not only did the continents fit but also saw that the same plants, broken mountains, and even the lines in the rocks matched up too. Thanks to his study of weather and rocks, he was able to find evidence to support his ideas. Others had noticed that the coasts seemed to fit, but Wegener had a leg up on them. With a little bending, though, you can make it work. Of course, over hundreds of millions of years, the land has curved and lost little pieces of land as islands, so it will not be a perfect fit. If you take a copy of a map and cut out the shapes of the continents, you will be able to fit them all together. The coasts of the two continents looked like they fit together like two puzzle pieces. Wegener kept searching for a better answer, though. How could the same creatures live on lands separated by the ocean? At the time, people believed that there had been bridges of land connecting these coasts and that these bridges had sunk beneath the waves. Reading in a library one day, Alfred came across a list of the same animals that live on the shores of both America and Africa. He was interested in everything, which is never a bad thing. A man named Alfred Wegener (1880-1930) also did not feel the earth move under his feet, which makes it even more impressive that he figured out that the continents move! He began his career studying stars, then moved on to rocks, and finally weather. ![]() How does this happen? Who figured this out? If they're moving, where did they start from? And where will they end up?Ĭan you feel the earth move under your feet? No, of course you can't. The seven big blocks of land called continents are moving through the sea a little bit every day. That great big continent that's under your feet slides around the planet like a big graham cracker. ![]()
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