same time they bring even greater fecundity as the mineral rich, volcanic ash is spread
over the region.
Two hundred years ago, two British naturalists working in southern India declared
that the rocks they examined in Talcher were of glacial origin. Ridiculed by their
colleagues and laughed at by other scientists, they had to wait another twenty years
before the discovery of a glacially striated rock pavement decided the issue in their
favour. A geological paper written in 1872 suggested this Permian-Carboniferous
formation be named Gondwana, after the ancient Kingdom of the Gonds, which is of
Dravidian origin and whose descendants still live in the area. Discoveries of similar
Permian-Carboniferous formations in Australia, South America and Southern Africa,
all containing fossils of the widespread Glossopteris fern, followed and in 1885 the
name Gondwanaland was introduced to describe a postulated ancient supercontinent.
Alfred Wegener was a German scientist specializing in polar research, astronomy
and meteorology. By the time he was thirty-two, he and his brother held the world
record for an uninterrupted balloon flight of fifty-two hours. He had earned a doctorate
in astronomy while publishing original research on the subject, had served as a
meteorologist on two Danish scientific expeditions to Greenland and had crossed its
mile-high ice sheet on foot. He had written several scientific papers on glaciers based
on his own field experiences and had become the Professor of Meteorology at the
University of Marburg near Frankfurt in Germany. In 1911, he was examining a new
atlas with a friend when he was struck by the apparent match of the coastlines of
Africa and South America:
For hours, we examined and admired the magnificent maps. At that point, a thought came
to me. Does not the east coast of South America fit exactly against the west coast of Africa,
as if they had once been joined? The fit is even better if you look at a map of the floor of
the Atlantic and compare the edges at the drop-off into the ocean basin, rather than at the
present edges of the continents. This is an idea I will have to pursue.In 1912 Wegener wrote a paper in which he proposed these continents had once
been joined together. According to his model all the continental land masses had once
been joined into a single supercontinent called Pangea, which subsequently split into
the northern land mass of Laurasia and the southern landmass of Gondwana. This split
set in motion two separate evolutionary pathways for the earth’s flora and fauna. Later
movements caused Gondwana to separate into Antarctica, Australia, South America
and Africa, with India rapidly moving north to rejoin the northern land mass.
Wegener’s book The Origin of Continents and Oceans published in 1915 was
received by a sceptical, even hostile, scientific community, but his idea ultimately
proved to be one of the greatest geological insights of the century. Wegener based his
(^12) Where Australia Collides with Asia
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