continental drift
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AI overview
Continental drift is the gradual movement of Earth's continents across the planet's surface over millions of years. It matters because understanding how continents move helps explain the distribution of animals and plants around the world, the locations of earthquakes and volcanoes, and the overall structure and history of our planet.
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Article
Continental drift is a highly supported scientific theory, originating in the early 20th century, stating that Earth's continents move or drift relative to each other over geologic time. The theory of continental drift has since been validated and incorporated into the science of plate tectonics, which studies the movement of the continents as they ride on plates of the Earth's lithosphere.
The speculation that continents might have "drifted" was first put forward by Abraham Ortelius in 1596. A pioneer of the modern view of mobilism was the Austrian geologist Otto Ampferer. The concept was independently and more fully developed by Alfred Wegener in 1912, and expanded into book form with his 1915 publication, Die Entstehung der Kontinente und Ozeane (The Origin of Continents and Oceans). However, at that time his hypothesis was rejected by many, largely because there was no known geological mechanism which could propel such massive movements. In 1931, the English geologist Arthur Holmes proposed mantle convection for that mechanism, which is now known to be powered by radioactive decay and primordial heat and a much smaller amount of heat from tidal heating.