Abstract
DISCUSSION AT THE BRITISH ASSOCIATION, HULL. ON Monday, September 11, the meeting room of the Geological Section of the British Association was the theatre of a lively but inconclusive discussion on the Wegener hypothesis of the origin of the continents. This hypothesis, which is a development of the well-established theory of isostasy, regards the continental masses as cakes of light siliceous material floating on a heavier basaltic, fluid or viscid, substratum, which in its turn reaches the surface in a solidified form on the floors of the oceans. The continents, which are thus movable, are supposed in Carboniferous times to have formed a single mass, and to have split up by rift-valley formation and started floating apart in late Cretaceous or early Tertiary times. The mountain ranges fringing the Pacific are supposed to have been produced along those margins of the continents which are or have been, in virtue of their motion, impinging on the hard oceanic crust, the belts of thick sedimentation along the continental shelves localising the folding.
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WRIGHT, W. The Wegener Hypothesis. Nature 111, 30–31 (1923). https://doi.org/10.1038/111030a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/111030a0
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