Continental drift - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Continental drift is the movement of the Earth's continents relative to each other. The hypothesis that continents 'drift' was first put forward by Abraham Ortelius in 1596 and was fully developed by Alfred Wegener in 1912. However, it was not until the development of the theory of plate tectonics in the 1960s, that a sufficient geological explanation of that movement was understood. (This article gives an overview about the development of the continental drift hypothesis before 1950. For the contemporary theory, see the article plate tectonics.)