Earth Science: National Geographic – Colliding Continents Video Worksheet 1.

List the 7
continents. _______________ _______________ _______________ _______________
_______________ _______________ _______________ 2. 4.6 billion years ago, the Earth is
created from what? _________________________ 3. The heaviest elements, including
_____________ and _____________, sink in the early molten Earth to form the
_________________. 4. The lighter elements, including ______________ and
_______________ rise towards the surface and erupt in volcanoes as molten rock. 5. Most
scientists believe that the water that formed our oceans came from many, many
________________, which contained water. 6. How old was Earth believed to be when the first
early, relatively stable land masses formed? _______________ years old 7. What continent is
believed to be the site of the earliest giant continental land mass on Earth? _______________ 8.
What type of rock formed the first continents? _________________________ 9. As radioactive
uranium decays it turns into what stable element? _______________ 10. Why is granite less
dense than other rock in Earth’s mantle? __________________ 11. The ‘giant jigsaw puzzle’ of
interlocking pieces that make up Earth’s crust are called what? __________________________
12. The tectonic plates “float” on what layer of Earth? __________________________ 13.
Evidence for the theory of continental drift was first proposed in 1912 by what German
Scientist? __________________________________ 14. When Wegener first proposed his
theory of continental drift, why did the scientific community reject his ideas?
____________________________________________ Nat Geo Colliding Continents Worksheet
Name ________________________ Hour ____ Video Worksheet
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCSJNBMOjJs&list=HL1359292422 15. Heat escaping
from the core creates ____________ _______________ in the next layer of the Earth, the
______________________. 16. How many tectonic plates can be identified on Earth today?
__________________ 17. Where does old seafloor sink back into the Earth to be recycled?
______________ 18. The world’s last supercontinent is known as _____________________. 19.
How many years ago did the supercontinent Pangaea begin breaking up? ___________ years ago
20. During the break-up of Pangaea, South America split off from ______________, North
America split off from ________________, and Australia split off from __________________
and drifted north. 21. As plates move across the Earth, crust and rock is dragged back down into
the Earth at what type of zones? ____________________ zones 22. When continental crust
collides with continental crust at convergent plate boundaries and no subduction occurs, what
begins to form? _________________ 23. The formation of the Alps is the direct result of
collision between what two continents? ____________________ and ____________________
24. The Himalayan mountain range formed as a result of the collision of what two tectonic
plates? ____________________ and ____________________ 25. The Grand Canyon is located
in what state? ____________________ 26. How long and wide is the Grand Canyon? _______
miles long, _______ miles wide 27. Describe the relationship between the age of rock layers and
the depth travelled into the Grand Canyon.
________________________________________________ 28. 250 million years ago the Grand
Canyon began to form when what two plates began to collide? ____________________ and
_________________A compilation of seismic images, geochronology and plate-motion
reconstruction has been used to compare the location and chronology of a hotspot track at the base
and top of the North American lithosphere. The work reveals a conspicuous misalignment between the
surface and deep parts of the tracks. Misalignment increases with age along the track, and is best
explained by creep in the mantle lithosphere beneath North America. The sense of shear implied by
these observations indicates that motion of the plate is driven by viscous traction at the base of the
plate. This is of significance forBasically, Nicole, it was done initially on simple ideas and many
guesses.

Someone said, “Oh, look, Africa and South America look as though they might have fitted together at
one time, and from then on, people started to see if it was an idea that might work. “Oh, I wonder if
we can fit India in somewhere?” Much like a big (very big) jigsaw puzzle.

So they started to look at the old rocks and look to see where different continents had the same rocks
as each other. That helped to start to fit them together.

Then they looked in those rocks for indications of glaciations that might have suggested that the land
might have been at the south pole at the time when those rocks were formed. And they found that
that fitted in as well.

Then they looked at some of the fossils in the rocks and worked out that various parts of the
continents must have fitted together because they had the same fossils at their edges.

And so much of this idea about Pangaea was worked out before all the modern, complicated stuff was
invented and used. And now, as the other answers say, modern equipment can confirm much of what
we believed was true. But the real work was done in a much simpler fashion before modern
technology.

Many people like to make things sound technical and complicated, but geology is not really like that.
It is a subject that requires a lot of intuition and guesswork, and imagination. That’s why I like it so
much. After that, the technology can help us.

I am very old, so I got out my school textbook from when I was fifteen years old in 1957. And it is all
in there. I was so interested in your question that I have scanned in some of the diagrams from my
book (Holmes Physical Geology) to show you that what I say is correct.

Look at the first diagram, which shows what I told you about Africa and South America. It was drawn
by a man called Mr Snider, in 1858, which is even before I was born.\U0001f642

And then the second diagram shows the continents drifting apart, as drawn by a Mr Wegener in 1915.

The important point is that all of this work was done without any fancy technical equipment at all.
All the complicated work and complex technology that we apply today is simply to confirm and fine
tune what our clever human brains worked out long ago already. You have to remember that by the
time I was thirty years old in 1972, there weren’t even any digital watches, calculators, or mobile
phones, or even colour TV - and certainly no PCs. We did most of the great work with just our brains.
 Things are often a lot more simple than people think.

Hope that helps you.

Regards,

Peter.
Written Jun 29 · View Upvotes · Answer requested by Nicole Phoebe Barrera Anasco
Related QuestionsMore Answers Below

 How the continents formed the primative pangaea?

 Was Pangaea like the continents we have now?
 Pangaea separated the world into seven continents, is it possible those continents can be
broken into even smaller continents?
 How do we know about existence of super-continents prior to Pangaea?
 Pangaea: Will the continents on Earth once again form a "Pangea" millions of years from
now?

Richard Perry, Batchelors in Geology. PhD in Geophysics.

147 Views
To elaborate a bit on Dans answer but keeping it basic - I'm assuming you don't want a university
text book on this (if you do then skip this answer its too simplistic for you!). There are lots of bits of
evidence that join together to create a picture. The simplest one for more recent history is simply that
the shapes of continents seem to fit together like pieces of a jigsaw. Move them around and you can
get an idea of their relative positions.

But some of the most compelling evidence is a combination of Paleo Magnetism and Age.

You can work out the actual age of many rocks using decay rates of radioactive elements contained in
them.

Most rocks also contain some iron. Iron is magnetic. Depending on the type of rock when the rock
was formed the iron in the rock gets magnetised. Imagine that the rock is full of little compass
needles originally they all pointed to North. The rock gets moved around as the continent it is sitting
in moves around through plate tectonics. The little compasses in the rock probably no longer point to
north - they've been moved around too. But you can measure what direction they point in now and
you know the age of the rock. So by working backwards you can work out the orientation of that rock
when it was formed - and that means you can work out how much the continent has rotated since
then.

You can elaborate a bit more - because you may also be able to measure the inclination of the
magnetic field preserved in the rocks. Inclination is a measure of how much the magnetic field "dips"
from the vertical. The earths magnetic field is approximately vertical at the poles and horizontal at
the equator. So knowing the inclination of the field in the rock tells you what latitude it was when it
was formed - how far it was from the equator. That's a great third piece of information to have
( Someone else will need to tell you whether you can tell whether it was North or South of the
equator - I don't know enough!)

Do that for enough rocks, of enough different ages, from all over the world and you can work out how
the different bits of crust have moved around over time.
Written Jun 29 · View Upvotes

Emily Devenport, I'm a geology student who lives in Arizona (The Geology Capital of the World).
96 Views
I'm going to assume you mean how did they know our modern continents used to be one
supercontinent before it rifted apart and they moved into their current position. A guy named Alfred
Wegener first came up with a theory called Continental Drift. Several things made him suspicious:

1.) The "fit" of the continents. Africa and South America kind of look like they could fit together like
puzzle pieces. It was enough to make people go "Hmmn . . ."

2,) Fossils of the same plants and animals were found on both sides of the Atlantic, and no one could
figure out how those life forms would show up on opposite sides of the world.

3.) Glacial till deposits were discovered in the southern tips of continents, and the striations made
more sense when the continents were fitted together.

Wegener couldn't explain the mechanism that would adequately explain how the continents were
being moved, but later scientific developments supported the idea that the continents were and still
are moving (because of plate tectonics). Radar mapping the ocean bottom discovered spreading
ridges (where the plates are moving apart) and deep trenches (where plates are subducting into the
mantle). And paleomagnetism showed that when magma cools into igneous rock, the crystals align
with the earth's magnetic field. At first scientists wondered if this meant that the field wandered
(pretty drastically), but eventually the position of those crystals proved that those rocks (and the
continents) were in a different position when they formed.
Written Jun 29 · Answer requested by Nicole Phoebe Barrera Anasco

Dan C, Academic Geologist

45 Views
What do you mean? Do you mean how did geologists calculate the position of historical continent
placement or how did they calculate the pre-historical continent placement?

If you meant historical then it was just a lot of calculus. Satellites made it a lot easier though in
recent times.
If you meant pre-historical continent placement then that's very complex but primarily it's based on
tectonic plate velocities at spreading centers and subduction zones, taking into account the age of
those divergent and convergent systems while factoring in proven ancient divergent and convergent
systems.

We corroborate the results obtained in a variety of different fields as well. Such as the fossil content
of sedimentary layers in those areas and their mineralogically composition, the recorded
paleomagnetism of ferromagnesian minerals contained within rocks of that time period,... and such.

It's very complicated, basically.

understanding the driving forces of plate tectonics.

CONTINENTS IN COLLISION : PANGEA ULTIMA

C REEPING MORE SLOWLY THAN A HUMAN FINGERNAIL GROWS ,
E ARTH ' S MASSIVE CONTINENTS ARE NONETHELESS ON THE MOVE .  
Listen to this story (requires RealPlayer)
October 6, 2000 -- The Earth is going to be a very different place 250 million years from now.
Africa is going to smash into Europe as Australia migrates north to merge with Asia. Meanwhile the Atlantic
Ocean will probably widen for a spell before it reverses course and later disappears.
Two hundred and fifty million years ago the landmasses of Earth were clustered into one supercontinent
dubbed Pangea. As Yogi Berra might say, it looks like "deja vu all over again" as the present-day continents
slowly converge during the next 250 million years to form another mega-continent: Pangea Ultima.

Above: A map of the world as it might appear 250 million years from now. Notice the clumping of most of the
world's landmass into one super-continent, "Pangea Ultima," with an inland sea -- all that's left of the once-
mighty Atlantic Ocean. Image courtesy of Dr. Christopher Scotese.
The surface of the Earth is broken into large pieces that are slowly shifting -- a gradual process called "plate
tectonics." Using geological clues to puzzle out past migrations of the continents, Dr. Christopher Scotese, a
geologist at the University of Texas at Arlington, has made an educated "guesstimate" of how the continents
are going to move hundreds of millions of years into the future.
"We don't really know the future, obviously," Scotese said. "All we can do is make predictions of how plate
motions will continue, what new things might happen, and where it will all end up." Among those
predictions: Africa is likely to continue its northern migration, pinching the Mediterranean closed and driving up
a Himalayan-scale mountain range in southern Europe.
What's it like to see two continents collide? Just look at
the Mediterranean region today.
Africa has been slowly colliding with Europe for millions
of years, Scotese said. "Italy, Greece and almost
everything in the Mediterranean is part of (the African
plate), and it has been colliding with Europe for the last
40 million years."
That collision has pushed up the Alps and the Pyrenees
mountains, and is responsible for earthquakes that
occasionally strike Greece and Turkey, Scotese noted.
Above: The possible appearance of the Earth 50 million
years from now. Africa has collided with Europe, closing
off the Mediterranean Sea. The Atlantic has widened,
and Australia has migrated north. Image courtesy of Dr.
Christopher Scotese.
"The Mediterranean is the remnant of a much larger ocean that has closed over the last 100 million years, and
it will continue to close," he said. "More and more of the plate is going to get crumpled and get pushed higher
and higher up, like the Himalayas."
Australia is also likely to merge with the Eurasian continent. 
"Australia is moving north, and is already colliding with the southern islands of Southeast Asia," he
continued. "If we project that motion, the left shoulder of Australia gets caught, and then Australia rotates and
collides against Borneo and south China -- sort of like India collided 50 million years ago -- and gets added to
Asia."
Meanwhile, the Americas will be moving further away from Africa and Europe as the Atlantic Ocean steadily
grows. The Atlantic sea floor is split from north to south by an underwater mountain ridge where new rock
material flows up from Earth's interior. The two halves of the sea floor slowly spread apart as the ridge is filled
with the new material, causing the Atlantic to widen.
"It's about as fast as your fingernails grow. Maybe a little bit
slower," Scotese said. Still, over millions of years that minute
movement will drive the continents apart. 
Left: NASA's LAGEOS II satellite measures tiny shifts in
continental positions from Earth orbit. [more information]
That part of the prediction is fairly certain, because it is just the
continuation of existing motions. Beyond about 50 million years
into the future, prediction becomes more difficult.
"The difficult part is the uncertainty in (new behaviors)," Scotese
said. 
"It's like if you're traveling on the highway, you can predict where
you're going to be in an hour, but if there's an accident or you
have to exit, you're going to change direction. And we have to try
to understand what causes those changes. That's where we have
to make some guesses about the far future -- 150 to 250 million
years from now."
In the case of the widening Atlantic, geologists think that a "subduction zone" will eventually form on either the
east or west edges of the ocean. At a subduction zone, the ocean floor dives under the edge of a continent and
down into the interior of the Earth.
"The subduction zone turns out to be the most important part of the system if you want to understand what
causes the plates to move," Scotese said.
Like cold air drifting down from an open attic in winter, the cold, dense seabed at the ocean's edges sometimes
starts sinking into the playdough-like layer beneath the crust, called the "mantle."
 Above: A diagram showing the major processes of plate tectonics.

"As it sinks, it pulls the rest of the plate with it," like a tablecloth sliding off a table. This accounts for most of the
force that moves the plates around, Scotese said.
This "slab pull" theory for the mechanism driving the motion of the plates stands in
opposition to the older "river raft" theory.
"For a long time, geologists had this model that there were 'conveyer belts' of mantle
convection, and the continents were riding passively on these conveyer belts, sort of like
a raft on a river," Scotese said. "But that theory's all wrong."
If a subduction zone starts on one side of the Atlantic -- Scotese thinks it will be the west
side -- it will start to slowly drag the sea floor into the mantle. If this happens, the ridge
where the Atlantic sea floor spreads would eventually be pulled into the Earth. The Sign up for
widening would stop, and the Atlantic would begin to shrink. EXPRESS
SCIENCE NEWS
Tens of millions of years later, the Americas would come smashing into the merged Euro- delivery
African continent, pushing up a new ridge of Himalayan-like mountains along the
boundary. At that point, most of the world's landmass would be joined into a super-
continent called "Pangea Ultima." The collision might also trap an inland ocean, Scotese
said.
"It's all pretty much fantasy to start with. But it's a fun exercise to think about what might happen," he said. "And
you can only do it if you have a really clear idea of why things happen in the first place."
For now it appears that in 250 million years, the Earth's continents will be merged again into one giant
landmass...just as they were 250 million years before now. From Pangea, to present,
to Pangea Ultima!