Plate Tectonics, History of

History

Plate tectonics is the paradigmatic theory of the modern geology since 40 years. It established that the major features of the Earth’s surface depend on the dynamics of lithospheric plates, created from the mantle at the oceanic ridges and absorbed into the mantle at the oceanic trenches, except continental crust that can never sink and, thus, is condemned to be recycled in new mountain ranges. If moving plates are clear scientific evidence today, it was not at the beginning of the twentieth century when German meteorologist and geophysicist Alfred Wegener proposed his theory of continental translation (later translated with derisive sense in continental drift) against the leading theory on mountain formation.

In 1912, Alfred Wegener (1880–1930) proposed to consider that all continents might once have formed a single continent (today called a supercontinent) he named Pangaea that might have been broken. Then, these continental masses might have drifted over oceanic crust. Their...