But like many novel scientific ideas, his theory was met with ridicule. Wegener’s theory of continental drift represented a new way of thinking about our world, and today we know he was basically on the right track. As evidence, he found fossils of identical plants and animals on continents now separated by oceans. He proposed the Earth’s disparate lands once fit together as a single ancient supercontinent he called Pangea, a Greek word meaning “all lands.” He believed Pangea was surrounded by a single body of water-the Panthalassa-and the continents maneuvered to their current positions by floating through the sea like icebergs. The first scientific theory suggesting that continents could drift on their own finally came in 1912, from the German geophysicist Alfred Wegener. They depict his interpretation of how the American and African continents may once have fit together before becoming separated. In 1858, Snider-Pellegrini made these two maps. In 1596, Ortelius suggested the continents may have traveled to their current positions when the Americas were "torn away from Europe and Africa.” The in 1858, the French geographer Antonio Snider-Pellegrini also suggested the continents moved apart laterally, again pointing to the biblical flood as the main instigator. The first was Abraham Ortelius, the Flemish cartographer credited with inventing the modern Atlas.
#ABRAHAM ORTELIUS FLAT EARTH SERIES#
In the 17th and 18th centuries, many Europeans thought the planet was shaped by a series of biblical catastrophes, and the wrath of God remained a trendy explanation for the position of the continents.īefore the 20th century, only two prominent scientists in the West even entertained the idea of mobile continents, and both credited a catastrophic event. In 1668, a French monk by the name of François Placet suggested that America and Africa separated when the lost island of Atlantis was destroyed by the biblical flood and sank into the depths, creating the Atlantic Ocean. The first scholarly attempts to explain the puzzle-piece configuration of the continents invoked the hand of God. Even respected scientists like Charles Darwin and Nikola Tesla flirted with the idea. But up until the point plate tectonics became widely accepted, the Expanding Earth theory was a popular explanation for the processes that shaped the Earth.
Today, following a 20th century golden age of marine science, scientists understand how shifting plates have shifted the continents over the course of Earth’s history. The seas formed in the gaps between the continents. Then, as the dwarf Earth expanded, the continental shell broke apart. The theory claimed that millions of years ago, our planet was only about 60 percent of its current size and that the entire surface of this pint-sized globe was blanketed by land. The matching coasts were “more than a curiosity"
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