The rise and fall of Pangea

    The thought of entire landmasses moving thousands of miles across oceans is one that is difficult to comprehend. From 300 to 270 million years ago, "mantle convection"(Riddel, 2014), the act of heat rising from the earth core to the mantle, splitting the tectonic plates apart, then cooling down and falling back to the core, caused the land we now know as our continents to form one “supercontinent”(Briney, 2014). All of the separate continents that we know today were surrounded by one ocean, named Panthalassa. This land mass is called Pangea (sometimes spelled Pangaea), which translates to all lands in Greek. On the contrary to the name, there was another land mass consisting of modern day China know as Cathaysia, located west of Pangea. After 70 million years of togetherness, Pangea was broken apart by the same forces that brought it together and the movement of tectonic plates, leaving us with the geography we live with today.
    Alfred Wegener was the first to address the idea of Pangea while skimming his colleges library, where he found a thesis about identical reminisce of life all the way across the Atlantic Ocean. The explanation adopted by scientist had been sunken land bridges, but the recognizing that the some countries fit together similarly made Dr. Wegener reject the idea. Not only did Dr. Wegener find multiple similarities in the rock structures, he found coal in an environment that does not typically harbor coal, and multiple plant fossils that do not naturally grow in the areas they were found. Now, Dr. Wegener’s ideas about Pangea are our most accurate look into the past. 

References

Briney, A. (n.d.). All You Need to Know about the Supercontinent Pangea. Retrieved September 23,       2014, from http://geography.about.com/od/physicalgeography/a/Pangea.htm 

Riddel, P. (2014, August 10). What is mantle convection (J. Seminara, Ed.).
    Retrieved from Wise website: http://www.wisegeek.com/
    what-is-mantle-convection.htm

The breakup of Pangaea. (n.d.). Retrieved September 23, 2014, from
    http://www.exploratorium.edu/faultline/activezone/slides/pangea-slide.html

Waggoner, B. (n.d.). Alfred Wegener (1880-1930). Retrieved September 23, 2014,
    from http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/history/wegener.html