Learning Artifact 4

I knew from middle and high school that the continents started as one giant continent, Pangea, but I hadn’t really thought about how they spread out to where they are today.

During class I realized that I think my impression was that they had somehow floated there on the water? But of course that doesn’t make much sense.

So today’s class really made it click that they were moved there via plate tectonics, over hundreds of millions of years. They didn’t float, but they did move due to large convection cycles of molten rock inside the Earth, and new rock being formed at fault lines pushing continents apart.

Therefore it makes sense that many of the tectonic plates divide continents apart. It’s not a coincidence that the lines are there, it’s that the continents are split apart because of the lines being that those points.