The Pangea Puzzle

When I was a kid, I loved playing with globes. I liked that I could figure out where I was, then find places I had visited that were shockingly close by where I was on the map, and imagining what those other places might be like.

I couldn’t help but notice something cartographers had noticed for centuries: it looked an awful lot like South America and Africa were puzzle pieces that could fit together. Could it be possible that they were once connected?

If I wondered this as a kid, it’s no wonder that some very powerful minds were working on this very problem around the turn of the 20th century, right as the convergence of technology and scientific understanding were coming together in brand new ways.

One of these smart people was Alfred Wegener, a German meteorologist who was curious about all sorts of things. Wegener was very plugged into the scientific literature at the time, and he knew about the similarities of fossil plants and animals found on opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean…