The drifting lands book 3 manual#

This suggested that the oceans were a permanent feature of the Earth's surface, rather than them having 'changed places' with the continents. This appeared to be confirmed by the exploration of the deep sea beds conducted by the Challenger expedition, 1872–1876, which showed that contrary to expectation, land debris brought down by rivers to the ocean is deposited comparatively close to the shore on what is now known as the continental shelf.

The drifting lands book 3 manual#

Dana was enormously influential in America-his Manual of Mineralogy is still in print in revised form-and the theory became known as the Permanence theory. And, if the outlines of the continents were marked out, it follows that the outlines of the oceans were no less so'. The facts indicate that the continent of North America had its surface near tide-level, part above and part below it (p.196) and this will probably be proved to be the condition in Primordial time of the other continents also. This has been proved with regard to North America from the position and distribution of the first beds of the Lower Silurian, – those of the Potsdam epoch. In his Manual of Geology (1863), Dana wrote, 'The continents and oceans had their general outline or form defined in earliest time. In 1889, Alfred Russel Wallace remarked, 'It was formerly a very general belief, even amongst geologists, that the great features of the earth's surface, no less than the smaller ones, were subject to continual mutations, and that during the course of known geological time the continents and great oceans had, again and again, changed places with each other.' He quotes Charles Lyell as saying, 'Continents, therefore, although permanent for whole geological epochs, shift their positions entirely in the course of ages.' and claims that the first to throw doubt on this was James Dwight Dana in 1849.Īntonio Snider-Pellegrini's Illustration of the closed and opened Atlantic Ocean (1858)

by earthquakes and floods' and went on to say: 'The vestiges of the rupture reveal themselves if someone brings forward a map of the world and considers carefully the coasts of the three. suggested that the Americas were 'torn away from Europe and Africa. Kious described Ortelius' thoughts in this way: Ībraham Ortelius in his work Thesaurus Geographicus. Abraham Ortelius by Peter Paul Rubens, 1633Ībraham Ortelius ( Ortelius 1596), Theodor Christoph Lilienthal (1756), Alexander von Humboldt (18), Antonio Snider-Pellegrini ( Snider-Pellegrini 1858), and others had noted earlier that the shapes of continents on opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean (most notably, Africa and South America) seem to fit together.