Concepts
Continental Drift
Also Known As Taylor-Wegener Hypothesis
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Alfred Wegener's 1912 proposal that today's continents were once joined in a single landmass and have since drifted apart. It has subsequently been extensively validated and incorporated into plate tectonics, which studies the continents as they ride on plates of the lithosphere; Wegener's idea supplied the observation, and seafloor spreading later supplied the mechanism it had lacked.
Facts
Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
Evidence from paleomagnetism led to the revival of the continental drift hypothesis.
Pangaea is the reconstruction at the heart of Wegener's continental drift argument.
Held Differently
Plate Tectonics, Processes Not rejected: continental drift's core observation was validated and absorbed whole into plate tectonics once seafloor spreading supplied the missing mechanism. Variant, a different and superseded account of the same underlying reality, not a debunked claim.
Proposed By
Why this is disputed. Wegener is credited with developing continental drift into a comprehensive, evidence-based theory published in 1912, but the core idea that continents had once fit together or moved was proposed by others earlier, including Antonio Snider-Pellegrini in 1858 and Frank Bursley Taylor, whose continental-creep model was presented in 1908 and published in 1910.
Sources
Dissenting Readings (1 dissenting reading)
Proposed By: Alfred Wegener
Antonio Snider-Pellegrini illustrated in 1858 how the Atlantic coastlines could be closed together into a single landmass, and Frank Bursley Taylor proposed a mechanism of continental creep in 1908 (published 1910), the first to link continental motion to mountain building, attributing the Himalaya to the Indian subcontinent's collision with Asia. Wegener's distinct and larger contribution, the reason the theory carries his name, was assembling geological, paleontological and paleoclimatic evidence into a single systematic, testable case in 1912.
A dissenting reading, from Antonio Snider-Pellegrini and Frank Bursley TaylorContinental Drift (Wikipedia), Wikimedia Foundation
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