The source of ...

[Michael Grove]

 THE rift of Pangaea that resulted in a new ocean which is now know as the

 North Atlantic, as well as the creation of Appalachia, Planet Earth’s oldest

 mountain range; happened as just one of many rifts. The concept that the

 continents once formed a continuous land mass was first proposed by

 Alfred Wegener, the originator of the theory of continental drift, in his

 1912 publication The Origin of Continents (Die Entstehung der Kontinente).

 He expanded upon his hypothesis in his 1915 book The Origin of Continents

 and Oceans (Die Entstehung der Kontinente und Ozeane), in which he

 postulated that, before breaking up and drifting to their present locations,

 all the continents had formed a single supercontinent that he called the

 "Urkontinent".

 The name "Pangea" occurs in the 1920 edition of Die Entstehung der

 Kontinente und Ozeane, but only once, when Wegener refers to the ancient

 supercontinent as "the Pangaea of the Carboniferous". Wegener used the

 Germanised form "Pangäa", but the name entered German and English

 scientific literature (in 1922 and 1926, respectively) in the Latinized form

 "Pangaea" (of the Greek "Pangaia"), especially due to a symposium of the

 American Association of Petroleum Geologists in November 1926.

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