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Abraham Ortelius is most famous for creating and publishing the first Atlas. An atlas is a book that combines many maps so they have the same format and the same design. Abraham Ortelius was also the first ever recorded person to hypothesize continental drift. He "created" this theory when he realized that the coasts of Africa and South America looked like they could fit together. -
Nicolaus Steno, a Danish anatomist and geologist, proposed the
Law of Superposition. The law was presented as a major theses in one of his most controversial works "Dissertationis Prodromus". The law itself states that each layer of rock is older than the layer above it. Today, it is one of the general principles of geology. -
Farmer and Geologist James Hutton used Steno's law of Superposition to find granite penetrating metaphoric schists, in a way that suggested that the granite was formed by magma and not by water. This showed that the world wasn't shaped by a giant flood and that it wasn't just 6000 years old. On the Contrary, it showed that the world was actually much older, over 4 billion in fact -
Matthew Fontaine Maury, a naval officer first inferred a ridge under the Atlantic Ocean (Mid-Atlantic-Ridge) based on radar soundings from the USS Dolphin. The Mid-Atlantic-Ridge was later confirmed to exist during the expedition of the HMS Challenger in 1872 -
Same rock and fossil types have been "discovered" on different continents, although this was largely ignored by most people at the time. This was one of the first pieces of evidence for Continental Drift. It proved that at some point in time, the continents must've been connected or closer together in order to allow for land animals to cross over other the continents. -
On March 1896, French physicist Henri Becquerel accidentally discovered radioactive decay after opening a drawer. Radioactive decay is natural part of Earth's own system and a main source of heat inside of the Earth. It is also a driving force for Earth's tectonic system, the system that helps to create Earth's earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, and tectonic plates. -
German scientist Alfred Wegener theorized that the continents were once joined together into a supercontinent called Pangea. Wegener believed that Pangaea eventually broke apart, it's pieces drifting thousands of miles, forming the continents we know today, the theory we know today as Continental Drift. However until the late 1950s or 60s, most scientists rejected his theory because he had no hard evidence to explain how Continental Drift could possibly work -
Arthur Holmes a British geologist proposed that convection in the mantle are what drives the process of continental drift. As he explained, when magma heated, it tends to rise and then drop, and the sink, something that'd move continental plates. When he first proposed his theory, it wasn't taken very seriously at the time although the hypothesis did later gain support. -
Du Toit, a South African geologist was the first scientist to propose the idea of 2 original super-continents, separated by an ocean. The idea proposes that there were 2 super-continents which formed separately, but had eventually collided to form the supercontinent Pangaea, approximately 200-300 million years ago. -
Harry H. Hess, an American geophysicist developed a theory in which states that oceanic crust forms at mid-ocean-ridges and spreads out laterally away from the mid-ocean-ridges. The year after, Robert S. Dietz a geophysicist named the theory "Seafloor Spreading." Hess's theory helped future scientists to understand Wegner's theory of continental drift, a pivotal step for the development of the modern "Plate Tectonics Theory". -
In 1963, Fred Vine, Drummond Matthews, and others found that the crust around mid-ocean-ridges showed alternating bands. Each band had a polarity opposite of the surrounding bands. This suggested that as crust formed at the ridge, it magnetized with the polarity of the planet at the time. This new discovery supported Harry Hess's theory, "Seafloor Spreading" -
In 1965, Canadian geophysicist Tuzo Wilson proposed that there was a 3rd type of plate boundary-Transform faults or conservative plate boundaries. These faults slip horizontally, connecting various things such as oceanic ridges or ocean trenches. This would explain why volcanos could exist thousands of kilometers away from plate boundaries. The "discovery" of Transform faults is regarded as the "last piece" of the Theory of Plate Tectonics -
Alfred Wegener's theory of plate tectonics is finally accepted by most scientists of the time. This was also due to the work of other dedicated scientists including Dan McKenzie, John Tuzo Wilson, W. Jason Morgan, Andrija Mohorovičić and Marie Tharp. -
Professor Dan McKenzie, proposed the Theory of Plate Tectonics. He wrote a paper on his Theory of Plate Tectonics and created a spherical model (which represented the Earth). He used this model to define the mathematical principles of Plate Tectonics, in which he also used to strengthen the proof of Alfred Wegner's theory. -
Many new discoveries into the Theory of plate Tectonics are still being made thanks to scientists like James Valentine or Eldridge Moores. For example, the recent evidence proving that tectonic plates were firmly in place 4 billion years ago, much earlier than what was thought. The Theory of Plate Tectonics is also being taught at various schools around the world.