SCIENTIST RESEARCH PROJECT

ALFRED WEGNER

• Born November 1,1880 and he died November 1930
• He was one of the many scientist who believed in the idea that the Earth used to be a single landmass.
• The word that goes with him is continental drift, Pangaea
• Wegener noticed that the continents seemed to fit together.
• his hypothesis was formed since southern hemisphere exhibited an identical fossil and pattern.

CONT

• The only explanation for the fossils was that the continents used to be one.
• It was called the Gondwana Sequence.
• A second idea supporting movement of the continents was the glacial till deposits in the southern hemisphere.
• With the continents in their present positions, the till deposits indicate erratic glacier motion
• At first Wegner was not accepted by the scientific community.

SITES OVER WEGNER

• http://loki.stockton.edu/~hozikm/geol/Courses/The%20Earth/Content%20Web%20P...

HARRY HESS

• Born May 24, 1906 and died on August 25, 1969
• He contributed the sea floor spreading theory.
• Hess discovered that the oceans were shallower in the middle and found the presence of Mid Ocean Ridges
• Hess believed that ocean trenches were the locations where ocean floor was destroyed and recycled.
• Although his theory made sense, Hess knew, like Wegener, that he still needed convincing geophysical evidence

CONT

• Hess discovered the mid ocean ridges, and the sea floor spreading.

ABRAHAM ORTELIUS

• He was born on April 14, 1527 and he died on June 28, 1598
• Ortelius made the worlds first modern atlas.
• The hypothesis that continents 'drift' was first put forward by Abraham Ortelius in 1596
• This theory was also fully developed by Wengener in 1912.
• However, it was not until the development of the theory of plate tectonics in the 1960s

CONT

• that a sufficient geological explanation of that movement was found.
• The term that goes with Abraham Ortelius is plate tectonics.

DEFINITIONS

• Plate tectonics-
• scientific theory that the Earth's surface is made of very large sections that move very slowly
• Pangaea-
• Pangaea was knwon to be a large landmass made up of all the modern continents.

MORE TERMS

• Sea Floor Spreading-
• The formation in new areas of oceanic crust.
• Mid Ocean ridges-
• An elevated region on the bottom of the sea floor at the border of plate
• tectonics.

LAST TERM

• Continental drift -
• the gradual movement of the continents across the earth's surface.