10-11-2000 - Kids

sagar: Author=’Marc Airhart, Deborah Byrd’ program=” video=”Arthur Fretheim, Walla Walla, WA
Age: 6. “Pangea, sea creaturs and some storms at sea.” Using: “pencils”.*If you’d been going to school 200 million years ago, world geography would have been a whole lot easier!*

Scientists believe that, way back then, there weren’t a lot of separate continents on Earth. Instead, there was just one great big continent.

A lot of people notice that the coastlines of South America and Africa look as though they could fit together, like pieces of a puzzle. A century ago, a German geologist named Alfred Wegener came to believe this was no accident – and that all the continents once formed a single supercontinent. We now call that hypothetical supercontinent Pangea.

When Wegener announced his theory – in the year 1912 – hardly any scientists agreed with it. It wasn’t until the 1960s that the notion of a moveable crust for Earth became widely accepted. Nowadays, scientists believe that the dinosaurs once roamed the ancient supercontinent of Pangea.

Today, scientists believe that there wasn’t just one supercontinent. They think the continents have moved together and apart several times in Earth’s history.

Written by EarthSky