GEOL 107 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Carboniferous, Biogeography, Supercontinent Cycle
Document Summary
The 60-80"s is when plate tectonics were developed. Continents move at about the speed fingernails grow. Earthquakes are not random features: they tend to occur by plate boundaries. Continental drift an idea before its time. Continental drift was first proposed by alfred wegener in 1912: he developed this idea while spending several years alone in antarctica monitoring weather. See diagram of the fit between south american and africa in the lecture notes: the only major overlaps between south america and africa are where major deltas are located and those formed relatively recently. The worldwide distribution of fossils suggest that the continents were connected, otherwise the fossils couldn"t be distributed like they were: see diagram in notes showing some of this. Alfred called the massive continent containing modern south america, africa, Greenland and europe which used to be one mountain range a long time ago. The thousand islands are the roots of some of these mountains.