It’s strange to think of continents drifting like great islands floating free, untethered to the earth. For a very long time this was our way of explaining the gradual shift in the relative position of the continental land masses. The earliest geologic record seems to indicate that the current arrangement of continents occurred as the single large super-continent split and drifted apart. This ancient landmass was called Pangea and was made up of segments with names like Laurasia and Gondwana (and I wish Wakanda). The oceans of the time were called Panthalassa and Palaeo-Tethys. All I can say is that the God of Names must have had a ball.
These days you can still see how the continents fit together like puzzle pieces scattered on a brobdingnagian board.
The principles of science require that we test our hypotheses, and when we do we find the notion of continents “drifting”, while as dramatic and fun as a great carnival ride, is not completely accurate. Instead geologists extended the idea of drifting to include the notion that the Earth’s crust is made up of tectonic plates which are constantly moving in reaction to the stresses of the planet, and perhaps even tidal forces, although that is not certain. The places where the plates grind together are called rift zones, which is almost as much fun to say as continental drift.
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