He traveled extensively in Europe, and is specifically known to have traveled throughout the Seventeen Provinces in southern, western, northern, and eastern Germany (e.g., 1560, 1575–1576) France (1559–1560) England and Ireland (1576), and Italy (1578, and perhaps twice or thrice between 15).īeginning as a map-engraver, in 1547 he entered the Antwerp Guild of Saint Luke as an illuminator of maps. In 1575 he was appointed geographer to the king of Spain, Philip II, on the recommendation of Arias Montanus, who vouched for his orthodoxy. Abraham remained close to his cousin Emanuel van Meteren who would later move to London. Following the death of Ortelius' father, his uncle Jacobus van Meteren returned from religious exile in England to take care of Ortelius. In 1535, the family had fallen under suspicion of Protestantism. The Orthellius family were originally from Augsburg, a Free imperial city of the Holy Roman Empire. The complementary arrangement of the facing sides on Africa and South America is also another evidence which supports the idea of continental drift.Ortelius was born in the city of Antwerp, which was then in the Habsburg Netherlands (modern-day Belgium). Some of the existing evidence includes numerous earthworm families like Octochaetidae and Acanthodrilidae which are indigenous to both in Africa and South America. Another piece of evidence is of the discovery of the fossils of Lystrosaurus (a land reptile) on rocks of the same age in Antarctica, India, and Africa. Fossils of a freshwater reptile known as Mesosaurus was found both in South Africa and Brazil. Some of the evidence supporting the continental drift of the tectonic plates include the presence of similar animals and plant fossils on the shores of various continents, which suggest that they were once joined. Jack Oliver provided the seismologic proof which supports the idea of plate tectonic that replaced continental drift in an article which he published in 1968. In 1931 Holmes proposed that the mantle of the earth has some convention cells which dispersed radioactive heat which drifted the earth’s crust. Later, a British geologist known as Arthur Holmes championed this theory. One of the outstanding questions which Wegener failed to answer was what type of forces propelled the earth’s plates, and this resulted in his hypothesis being opposed by many scientists. Pangaea is believed to have been formed about 250 million years ago. Decades later, various geologists confirmed some of his ideas including the existence of a super-continent known as Pangaea. Even though the continental drift hypothesis was discarded, it did help introduce the idea of continental movement in geosciences. He believed that the continents plowed through the crust of the ocean. Wegner was a geographer and not a geologist, and other geologists believed that he did not have sufficient evidence.Īlthough his observations about the rocks and fossils were correct, Wegener was wrong on various issues. Another problem with Wegener's proposal was the fact that he stated that the velocity of continental drift was 8.202ft/year which is quite high (currently the acceptable rate of continental drift is 0.082ft/year). One of the reasons is that his theory had no credible mechanism. A number a geologists denounced his hypothesis after he published it in his book about the origin of oceans and continents in 1915. He believed that all eight continents were once a single supercontinent before separating. The hypothesis of continental drift was developed during the early parts of the twentieth century by Wegener. The continental drift theory was replaced by the plate tectonic theory which illustrates how the continents drift. The theory was independently developed in 1912 by Alfred Wegener, but it was rejected due to lack of mechanism (which was introduced by Arthur Holmes). Abraham Ortelius was the first geographer who proposed this phenomenon in 1596. Continental drift is a phenomenon which explains how the earth’s continents move on the surface of the ocean bed.
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