Continental Drift History







Wegener
1880-1930


- died without the consolation of support for his theory of plate tectonics 		You will need the web to view this animation of continental drift. Watch the timeline and the drifting continents over and over to get a temporal image. Pangaea begins to break up into Laurasia and Gondwanaland during the Jurassic Period.
The only ocean at the time was called Panthalassa as Gondwanaland separated from Laurasia another sea called Tethys was formed and its remnant the Mediterranean Sea will eventually close in .

 

Laurasia

 
It was the finding of glacial in various parts of the world remote from the poles that first led Wegener to consider the (at the time wild and crazy) theory of continental drift. It is important to have an intuitive understanding of the actual movements of the continents over Earth's history to appreciate how evolution was affected by this phenomena as well as why geological artifacts appear as they do.