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Essay / The hypothesis about the formation process of ancient and modern continents
Since ancient times, humans have always been curious about the Earth. In fact, humans began observing and describing geological phenomena, including the composition of continents, from the mid-16th century. In 1596, Abraham Ortelius, a Belgian cartographer and geographer, proposed that the Americas were interconnected with Europe and Asia before the prehistoric flood, which appeared in ancient mythology, and which may have occurred approximately 20 to 30 million years ago years, which occurred (L RUNDIĆ - Bulletin of the Natural History Museum, 2012, para#12). Additionally, in 1620, Francis Bacon had noticed the shape of the east coast of South America and the west coast of Africa on the map and had suggested the possibility that the Western Hemisphere was once connected to the Europe and Africa. After that, in 1668, the RPFPlesay of France believed that the Ameicas were not separated from the rest of the earth before the great flood. The similar continental plates depicted on the map have drawn more attention to the history and causes of the plate. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why violent video games should not be banned”?Get an original essayBased on previous theoretical research, humans have used existing technologies and equipment to continue to explore state research origin of the Earth. For example, in the late 19th century, the Austrian geologist Eduard Suess (1885) noticed that the rock formations of the continents of the southern hemisphere were very coherent and therefore grouped them into a single continent, called Gondwana. Furthermore, Suess also proposed another idea in 1893 that there existed a shallow inland sea between the continents Laurasia and Gondwana, then named the Tethys Sea by comparing the fossil records of the Alps and Africa (AMC Şengör - Nature , 1979). Alfred Lothar Wagner, a German meteorologist and geophysicist, assumed that the continent of the world was a unified whole before the Carboniferous Paleozoic, surrounded by vast oceans in 1912, called "Pangea". Nevertheless, Alexandre du Toit did not agree with Wagner's hypothesis; he proposed two original super continents separated by the Tethys Ocean, a northern/equatorial Laurasia and a southern/polar Gondwanaland in 1937 (Alex du Toit plate tectonics and people, n.d.). Furthermore, in “Supercontinents in Earth history” (JJW Rogers & M Santosh, 2003), the author proposes the period of constitution of three supercontinents, during the Mesozoic period; Laurasia and Gondwana were part of Pangea. Regardless of which scientist hypothesized about the original continent, they all believe that the continent they proposed split to form the seven continents of today's world, even though they did not have sufficient evidence to support their hypotheses. This essay will focus on what Some sort of force caused the ancient continents to break apart and the present seven continents to form. Due to crustal activities, the formation of continents has been affected. There are two opposing and long-standing arguments regarding geotectonic theory. One of these, called "fixism", was based on the hypothesis that the Earth was once a hot sphere, then later hardened with cooling and therefore had an ocean and a fixed continent, simultaneously, with the contraction of the Earth's cooling process. pressure was generated and there was no weak edge of the continent or deep marine basin filled with soft sediments, intermittently extruded into the mountains, which was first advocated by Isaac Newton. Fixism does not recognize the existence of large-scale horizontal movements, such as“Mobility”. It was only believed that the strength on the continents depended on the vertical movements of the continents and oceans. Additionally, the theory of geosynclinal platforms is an important aspect of fixism that was first developed by J. Hall (1859) and James Dwight Dana (1873) during classical studies. 'a study of the Appalachian Mountains (Geosynclinal Theory, nd). The geosynclinal platform theory argument was the theoretical pillar of the classical theory of the Earth's structure. He always considered the geosyncline (ocean) and shelf (land) as the basic geological structural unit and believed that the activities of the trough and shelf lie in the subsidence of the site and the movement ascending. The trough was transformed into a platform by movement and metamorphism, the process of development from mobile oceanic crust to stable continental crust. Therefore, the theory assumed that the movement of the earth's crust gradually stabilized and stationary. At the end of all conversions, geological movement is complete and the crust is rigid. Because the working method of this theory was mainly to study underground paleontology, which studied the law of crustal development over time, it was also called "historical school" or "traditional school". Furthermore, from the 19th century to the mid-20th century, fixism was predominant in geotectonics until mobilism was first published by AL Wagner in 1912. Mobilism is another of these two arguments; it is also an exception of fixism. In fact, the concept of continental drift is the most notable concept in the theory of mobilism. Additionally, the previous proposal regarding Pangea was also defended by ALWagner. In a conference (JC. Maxwell, continental drift and Dynamic earth, 1968), AL Wagner deduced that the dynamic mechanism of the continental drift of Pangea was linked to the two components of the Earth's rotation: the tidal force which drifted westward and the detachment force drifting westward. pointed at the equator. The lighter silicon-aluminum continental block floated on the heavier viscous silicon-magnesium layer (oceanic block). Due to the tidal force and extreme force, the continent of Pangea ruptured and separated from the silicon-magnesium layer, and the westward and equatorward activities drifted horizontally and moved nearby. However, Edward Irving wrote of a situation in his lecture "The Role of Latitude in Mobilism Debates" (2003), that there was a fierce debate in the late 1920s. Because the source of force The driving force behind continental drift was not found, so it was impossible to prove the correctness of Wagner's arguments. Although this hypothesis aroused deep interest from all geologists in the country, as C. Techert (1931) says in his book (Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences). Additionally, the lack of positive evidence for large-scale horizontal movement in the crust led to the theory being abandoned. But thanks to the rapid development of marine science, geophysics and paleomagnetics in the 1955s, there was plenty of reliable evidence to support continental drift and attract the attention of geographers again, such as, in the 1955s, The study of paleomagnetics measured the variation in the position of the magnetic pole in various geological eras, as the continents of each period slowly moved along the magnetic poles before the formation of a new ocean, which has now confirmed the possibility of continental drift (Irving. E, Drift of the major..