Take a close look at the world map. Pay close attention to Africa and South America. Can you see how they seem to fit together? Now take a look at the island of Madagascar and see how it seems to fit nicely near Mozambique. Well, we are not the only ones who can see this remarkable peculiarity. Many scientists have observed this and have been investigating the reason for it.
Over the past three hundred years, scientists have determined that the earth's shell is broken into smaller sections called plates.
Caption: Discovering Plate Boundaries
Copyright: Dale S. Sawyer, Rice University
These plates are constantly on the move. The scientists believe that over two hundred million years ago, all of the Earth's continents were joined together as a single huge super-continent. This super-continent was called Pangaea. As the plates that make up the earth's shell continually moved, the super-continent slowly started breaking apart, forming the continents as we know them today. It took several million years for this to happen. Continental Drift is the theory that states that the continents can move. The movement of the plates continues to happen even today and the continents will look very different two hundred million years into the future than they do today.
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A graphical presentation of the December 26th tsunami.
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Credits
Credits: Online
Credits: Books
Plate Tectonics by Kevin Cuff, Ian Carmichael, Carolyn Willard
Credits: Interactions
Ideas for team-generated interactions were conceived by reading articles from NASA and also from Creative Adventures activities.
Credits: Individuals
- Ms. Irivinti for teaching us how to use Dreamweaver for our web design, Photoshop and Fireworks for graphics as well as animating our logo. She taught us how to create different background (fading) effects, how to pick appropriate colors, and how to generate theme specific images, spacers etc. She also assisted us with all programming aspects of our website.
- Mrs. Cataldo, Ms. Irivinti and our parents for guiding us with research and content development. It was difficult to find information we needed in one place and their assistance helped us a lot in this regard.
- Mrs. Cataldo and Ms. Irivinti for reviewing and editing what we wrote. They told us when our writing needed more work and also taught us how to cite sources, obtain permission for images that we borrowed from other websites and also the proper way to credit them.
Our Interactions on Continental Drift
More Reading on Continental Drift
More Online Interactivities on Continental Drift
Vocabulary on Continental Drift
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