Overview of Volcanic Processes

Abstract

This is what the clergyman Thomas Dick from Scotland wrote 37 years before the German scientist Alfred Wegener (1880-1930) proposed in 1912 that the Earth’s land masses had once been joined together into a supercontinent (Hallam, 1975). In Novum Organum (1620) even Francis Bacon called attention to the similarities of the continental outlines between Africa and South America without suggesting that they may once had formed a unified land. And in 1856 Antonio Snider-Pellegrini suggested that the continents had actually moved across the surface due to a supernatural force. Wegener called his supercontinent Pangaea (from the Greek, “all lands”) and the northern and southern parts Laurasia¹ and Gondwanaland, ² respectively.

If we look at a terrestrial globe or map of the world, we shall perceive that the projection of the western coast of Africa nearly corresponds with the opening between North and South America, opposite to the Gulf of Mexico; that the projection in South America, about Cape St. Roque and St. Salvador, nearly corresponds with the opening in the Gulf of Guinea; so that, if we could conceive the two continents being brought into contact, the opening to which I have referred would be nearly filled up, so as to form one compact continent… A consideration of these circumstances renders it not altogether improbable that these continents were originally conjoined, and that at some former physical revolution or catastrophe, they may have been rent asunder by some tremendous power, when the waters of the oceans rushed in between them, and left them separated as we now behold them.

—Thomas Dick, 1875