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Abraham Ortelius
He was a Flemish cartographer and geographer. He was the first person to beleiev the continetns were joined together as he was the first person to see that South America and Africa would fit together. He suggested continental drift as an explination. -
Nicolaus Steno
By looking at the Italian mountain ranges he discovered the law of superposition. This is that sedimentary rock has layers and each layer down is older than the one above. -
James Hutton
His 'uniformitarian principle' was that geographic features didn't happen suddenly or via religious means, but instead that geographic processes occured over a long period of time. -
Alfred Wegener
Wegener was a professor of meteorology at the university of Marburg. He studied the fossils on the coasts of South America and Africa and found they were the same. This led to him coming to trhe conclusion that the continents used to be one massive supercontinent called Pangaea. This was a development on Ortelius' theory and it was not well recieved. The force that caused the continental drift could not be explained. -
Arthur Holmes
Holmes' theory to prove continental drift was true was the convection currents theory. He suggested that the convection currents in the mantle could break apart continents and move them in opposite directions. This idea was only accepted in the 1960s. -
Harry Hess
Sea floor spreading was idea that it is the seafloor that moves and it carries the continents with it from single points. Molten magma oozes upwards in between the plates in the ocean rift. The cooling of the hot magma expanded it and forced the plates further apart. The Atlantic ocean would get wider due to this. -
Dan McKenzie
The theory of plate tectonics combines continental drift and sea floor spreading. The lithosphere is broken into 7 rigid pieces called plates. These move in different directions at different speeds. The source of heat for the convection currents to occur is from radioactivity deep in te mante. He came up with transformative, divergent & convergent plate boundaries.
