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Geography Lost and Found
Page 31
Anyone who owns an atlas has noticed at some point that the Brazilian bulge of South America seems
to fit almost exactly into the facing indentation on the coast of Africa. At least a few people have long
been aware that if you make cutouts of the outlines of the continents and treat the assemblage as a kind
of jigsaw puzzle, the pieces fit together passably well into a single giant land mass and the fit is
considerably improved if you include the continental shelves as well as the dry land. But until the
middle of the 1960s this observation was pretty much ignored by geologists. A heretic like Alfred
Wegener might claim that the fit was too good to be coincidence, that it demonstrated that continents
were somehow drifting pieces of a primordial supercontinent. But mainstream geology could conceive
of no mechanism for such drift, and thus ignored his ideas.
So how did mainstream geology account for the shapes of the continents? Indeed, how did it account
for the existence of the continents, or for that matter of all of the aspects of the earth's surface that we
now believe to be the result of plate tectonics such as fault lines, rings of volcanoes, and for that matter
mountain ranges? The answer, by
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