Topic > The hypothesis on the ancient and modern continent formation process

Since ancient times, man has always been full of curiosity about the earth. In fact, man began to observe and describe geological phenomena, in particular the composition of the continents, starting from the mid-16th century. In 1596, Abraham Ortelius, a Belgian cartographer and geographer, proposed that the Americas were interconnected with Europe and Asia before the prehistoric flood, which appeared in ancient mythology, and may have occurred about 20-30 million years ago, which occurred (L RUNDIĆ - Bulletin of the Natural History Museum, 2012, par#12). Furthermore, in 1620, Francis Bacon had noted on the map the shape of the east coast of South America and the west coast of Africa and put forward the possibility that the Western Hemisphere was connected with Europe and Africa. Later, in 1668, RFP Plesay of France held that the Ameica were not separated from the rest of the earth before the great flood. The similar continental plates depicted on the map draw more attention to the history and causes of the plate. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original EssayBased on previous theoretical research, humans have used existing technologies and equipment to continue exploring research into the original state of the earth. For example, at the end of the 19th century, the Austrian geologist Eduard Suess (1885) noticed that the rock formations on the continents of the Southern Hemisphere were very coherent, so he combined them into a single continent, called Gondwana. Furthermore, in 1893 Suess also proposed another idea that there existed a shallow inland sea between the continents Laurasia and Gondwana, then called the Tethys Sea, by comparing the fossil records of the Alps and Africa (AMC Şengör - Nature, 1979) . Alfred Lothar Wagner, a German meteorologist and geophysicist, hypothesized that the continent of the world was a unified whole before the Carboniferous Paleozoic, surrounded by vast oceans in 1912, called “Pangea”. However, Alexander du Toit did not agree with Wagner's hypothesis; in 1937 he proposed two original super continents separated by the Tethys Ocean, a northern/equatorial Laurasia and a southern/polar Gondwana (Alex du Toit plate tectonics and people, n.d.). Furthermore, in “Supercontinents in Earth History” (JJW Rogers& M Santosh, 2003), the author proposed the period of establishment of three supercontinents, during the Mesozoic period; Laurasia and Gondwana were part of Pangea. No matter which scientist formulated the conjecture about the original continent, they all believe that the continent they proposed split to form the seven continents of today's world, although they do not have enough evidence to support their hypotheses. This essay will focus on what kind of force caused the breakup of the ancient continents and the formation of the current seven continents. Due to crustal activities, the formation of continents was affected. There are two opposing and long-standing arguments about geotectonic theory. One is called "fixism" and was based on the hypothesis that the earth was a hot sphere, then the earth hardened as it cooled and then had a fixed ocean and continent, at the same time, as the Earth's cooling process contracted, pressure was generated and there was no weak continental edge or deep-water basin filled with soft sediments, intermittently extruded into mountains, as first argued by Isaac Newton. Fixism does not recognize the existence of large-scale horizontal movements, such as “mobilism”. It was only believed that the force on the continents depended on the vertical movements of the continents and the ocean. Furthermore, geosynclinal platform theory is an important feature of fixismfirst developed by J. Hall (1859) and James Dwight Dana (1873) during the classic studies of a survey and study of the Appalachian Mountains (Geosyncline Theory, n.d.). The topic of geosynclinal platform theory was the theoretical pillar of the classical theory of the structure of the earth. He always regarded the geosyncline (ocean) and platform (land) as the basic geological structural unit and believed that the activities of the trough and platform were in situ subsidence and upward movement. The depression was transformed into a platform by movement and metamorphism, which was a process of development from a mobile oceanic crust to a stable continental crust. Therefore, the theory assumed that the movement of the earth's crust was gradually stabilizing and stationary. When all conversions are complete, geological movement is over and the crust is rigid. Since the working method of this theory consisted mainly in the paleontological study of the subsoil, which had long studied the laws of crust development, this is why it was also called "history school" or "traditional school". Furthermore, from the 19th century to the mid-20th century, fixism had been predominant over geotectonics until mobilism was first published by ALWagner in 1912. Mobilism is another of these two topics; it is also an exception to fixism. Indeed, the concept of continental drift is the most notable one in the theory of mobilism. Furthermore, the previous proposal on Pangea was also supported by ALWagner. A conference (JC. Maxwell, Continental Drift and Dynamic Earth, 1968) presented that ALWagner deduced that the dynamic mechanism of continental drift in Pangea was related to the two components of the Earth's rotation: the tidal force moving westward and the detachment that indicated the equator. The lighter continental block of silicon-aluminum floated on the viscous layer of heavier silicon-magnesium (oceanic block). Due to tidal force and extreme force, the continent Pangea broke apart and separated from the silicon-magnesium layer, and the activities westward and at the equator shifted horizontally and moved nearby. However, Edward Irving wrote a situation in his lecture “The role of latitude in mobilism debates” (2003) that there was a heated debate in the late 1920s. Since the source of the driving force that caused continental drift, it was impossible to prove the correctness of Wagner's arguments Although this hypothesis aroused deep interest from all countries geologists as stated by C.Techert(1931) in his book (Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences). Furthermore, the lack of positive evidence of large-scale horizontal displacement in the crust meant that the theory was omitted. But thanks to the rapid development of marine, geophysical and paleomagnetic sciences in the 1955s, much reliable evidence supported it. of continental drift returned to the attention of geographers, such as, for example, in the 1955s, the study of paleomagnetism measured the variation in the position of the magnetic poles in various geological eras since the continents of each period had moved slowly along the magnetic poles before the formation of a new ocean, which just confirmed the possibility of continental drift (Irving. E, Drift of the major continental block from the Devonian, 1977). In the 1960s, Harry.Hess and RSDeitz proposed the seafloor spreading hypothesis to provide further evidence to the theory of continental drift and to improve it (H Frankel - Scientific discovery: Case study, 1980). The seafloor spreading theory believes that the oceanic crust of.