Continents Are Fixed in Place

Continental drift theory, proposed by Alfred Wegener in 1912 based on fossil and geological matching, was ridiculed for decades. It was vindicated and incorporated into plate tectonics theory in the 1960s when seafloor spreading, paleomagnetic evidence, and earthquake patterns demonstrated that continents do move. The Earth's lithosphere is divided into plates that drift and collide at a few centimetres per year, reshaping the planet over geological time.