You really ought to do at least a
little research before doubling down on somethingi that's been challenged. This took about ten seconds.
Early history
See also:
Early modern Netherlandish cartography and geography
Abraham Ortelius by
Peter Paul Rubens, 1633
Abraham Ortelius (
Ortelius 1596),
[5] Theodor Christoph Lilienthal (1756),
[6] Alexander von Humboldt (1801 and 1845),
[6] 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.
[7] W. J. Kious described Ortelius' thoughts in this way:
[8]
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."
[9] He quotes
Charles Lyell as saying, "Continents, therefore, although permanent for whole geological epochs, shift their positions entirely in the course of ages."
[10] and claims that the first to throw doubt on this was
James Dwight Dana in 1849.
Antonio Snider-Pellegrini's Illustration of the closed and opened
Atlantic Ocean (1858)
[11]
In his
Manual of Geology (1863), Dana wrote, "The continents and oceans had their general outline or form defined in earliest time. 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. 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. And, if the outlines of the continents were marked out, it follows that the outlines of the oceans were no less so".
[12] 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.
[13]
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. This suggested that the oceans were a permanent feature of the Earth's surface, rather than them having "changed places" with the continents.
[9]
Eduard Suess had proposed a supercontinent
Gondwana in 1885
[14] and the
Tethys Ocean in 1893,
[15] assuming a
land-bridge between the present continents submerged in the form of a
geosyncline, and
John Perry had written an 1895 paper proposing that the earth's interior was fluid, and disagreeing with
Lord Kelvin on the age of the earth.
[16]