Many years ago, I had an aunt who dated a guy that enjoyed sharing his vast knowledge of subjects that most people found odd. But he had a captive audience with me. I was open to hearing his theories about UFOs and the science that the aliens built into the Great Pyramid in Giza. His discussions about the Kennedy assassination made me believe that Oswald did not act alone.

However, the day he came over and spread pieces of two jigsaw puzzles on the floor that led to me believing in the theory of continental drift. The first puzzle we worked on was a very large Mercator projection of the continents on Earth. Since we both were familiar with the continents, we completed the puzzle quickly.

He then went to his car,popped open the trunk and took out a very large wooden container. As we carried it into the house, he told me the box contained a homemade puzzle that will open my eyes and make me a believer of a bold hypothesis that was proposed in 1912.

He emptied the contents on the floor. I stood over it and saw wooden shapes that looked like the continents, except they were assembled together to form one larger land mass.

Sensing my confusion, he said “Welcome to Pangea.” He placed his hands on the shapes and slowly began to pull them apart. I was captivated as I watched South America slowly pull away from Africa. As the wooden land mass continued to be pulled apart, he told me about the theory of Continental Drift. 

Early cartographers noted the apparent fit of coastlines of continents. For example, South America and Africa seems to be like jigsaw puzzle pieces and can fit together. In 1912, Alfred Wegener proposed the concept that the continents at one point were one part of one single supercontinent which he called Pangaea meaning “all lands.” His theory was that Pangaea began to break apart 200 million years ago and the continents drifted to their present positions

His theory was met with a lot of skepticism. Eventually some evidence began to support his claims. Naturalists noted that similar fossils of plants and animals were found on continents that are now widely separated by oceans. An example is the distribution of aquatic freshwater reptiles. These reptiles live in freshwater bodies such as lakes and rivers. They cannot survive in oceanic salt water. .Fossils of these reptiles are found in the southern parts of Africa and North America separated by the Atlantic Ocean. The simple fact is that freshwater reptiles could not swim across the oceans yet their fossils wind up on every continent.

Glaciers around the world provide climactic evidence that continents which had very different types of climates deposits and glaciers in India, Africa and South America suggests that these regions were much closer to the South Pole than they are now.

Despite the evidence that seemed to prove his theory, the scientific community presented lots of opposition. The main complaint was what could possibly be the plausible mechanism for continents to be drifting apart. Wegener counted by saying the oceanic crusts were driven by forces related to the earth’s rotation and tidal sources. However, that idea was not widely accepted. All that changed when the development of theory of plate tectonics offered a comprehensive framework that explained the movement of continents. Simply put plate tectonics holds that the Earth’s shell is divided into rigid plates that float on the semifluids closer to the crust. These plates move with the convective currents in the mantle driven by the heat from the earth’s interior.

Scientists use global positioning systems and satellite data to try to measure the movement of these tectonic plates. These measurements confirm that the continents are still moving at rates of a few centimeters per year.

So if the continents continue drifting, eventually New Yorkers could hail a taxi to grab some lunch at a café in Paris named “Pangaea.”

Hudson Cooper is a resident of Sullivan County, a writer, comedian and actor.