Continental drift
movement of Earth's continents relative to each other
Continental drift is the movement of Earth's continents relative to each other over geologic time. When initially proposed as a scientific theory in the early 20th century, the idea that continents could move was widely rejected. However, continental drift has subsequently been extensively validated and is incorporated into the science of plate tectonics, which studies the movement of the continents as they ride on plates of the Earth's lithosphere.
The speculation that continents might have "drifted" was first put forward by Abraham Ortelius in 1596. A pioneer of the modern view of mobilism was Austrian geologist Otto Ampferer. The concept was independently and more fully developed by Alfred Wegener in 1912, and expanded into book form with his 1915 publication, Die Entstehung der Kontinente und Ozeane (The Origin of Continents and Oceans). However, at that time his hypothesis was rejected by many, largely because there was no known geological mechanism which could propel such massive movements. In 1931, English geologist Arthur Holmes proposed mantle convection for that mechanism, which is now known to be powered by radioactive decay and primordial heat and a much smaller amount of heat from tidal heating.
History
Early history
Abraham Ortelius (Ortelius 1596), Theodor Christoph Lilienthal (1756), Alexander von Humboldt (1801 and 1845), 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. W. J. Kious described Ortelius's thoughts in this way:
Abraham Ortelius in his work Thesaurus Geographicus ...
“Continental drift” enters the record as movement of Earth's continents relative to each other. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Continental, drift and movement can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q178605. The Library of Congress control number is sh85031548. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1596, 1912, 1915 and 1931.
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This entry incorporates text from “Continental drift” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.