Evidence In Support Of The Continental Drift
THE MATCHING OF CONTINENTS (JIG-SAW-FIT)
- The shorelines of Africa and South America facing each other have a remarkable and unmistakable match.
- A map produced using a computer program to find the best fit of the Atlantic margin was presented by Bullard in 1964. The match was tried at 1,000- fathom line instead of the present shoreline.
ROCKS OF SAME AGE ACROSS THE OCEANS
- The radiometric dating methods developed in the recent period have facilitated correlating the rock formation from different continents across the vast ocean.
- The belt of ancient rocks of 2,000 million years from the Brazil coast matches with those from western Africa.
- The earliest marine deposits along the coastline of South America and Africa are of the Jurassic age. This suggests that the ocean did not exist prior to that time.
TILLITE
- It is the sedimentary rock formed out of deposits of glaciers. The Gondwana system of sediments from India is known to have its counterparts in six different landmasses of the Southern Hemisphere.
- At the base, the system has thick tillite indicating extensive and prolonged glaciation. Counterparts of this succession are found in Africa, Falkland Island, Madagascar, Antarctica and Australia besides India.
- The overall resemblance of the Gondwana type sediments clearly demonstrates that these landmasses had remarkably similar histories.
- The glacial tillite provides unambiguous evidence of palaeo-climatic and also of drifting of continents.
PLACER DEPOSITS
- The occurrence of rich placer deposits of gold in the Ghana coast and the absolute absence of source rock in the region is an amazing fact.
- The gold-bearing veins are in Brazil and it is obvious that the gold deposits of Ghana are derived from the Brazil plateau when the two continents lay side by side.
DISTRIBUTION OF FOSSILS
- When identical species of plants and animals adapted to living on land or in freshwater are found on either side of the marine barriers, a problem arises regarding accounting for such distribution.
- The observations that Lemurs occur in India, Madagascar, and Africa led some to consider a contiguous landmass “Lemuria” linking these three landmasses. Mesosaurus was a small reptile adapted to shallow brackish water.
- The skeletons of these are found only in two localities: the Southern Cape province of South Africa and Iraver formations of Brazil.
- The two localities presently are 4,800 km apart with an ocean in between them.