HOW THE THEORY OF PLATE DEVELOPED

In 1912 Alfred Wegener (1880-1930) noticed the same thing and proposed that the continents were once compressed into a single proto continent which he called Pangaea and over time they have drifted apart into their current distribution. He believed that Pangaea was intact until the late carboniferous period, about 300 million years ago, when it began to break up and drift apart. However, Wegener hypothesis lacked a geological mechanism to explain how the continents could drift across the earth’s surface as he proposed. Continental drift was originally proposed by Alfred Wegener, a German meteorologist, in 1912. According to the theory, surface of the earth is broken into large plates. The size and position of these plates change over time. The edges of these plates, where they move against each other, are sites of intense geologic activity, such as earthquakes, volcanoes, and mountain building.