What pieces evidence wegener used to back up his theory?

Answer 1

Wegener noticed several things about the land masses on the Earth. The first being that some land masses are shaped like the pieces of a jigsaw, Africa's West coast mirroring South America's East coast for example. He looked at the rock layers in these countries and found that the rock layers were the same too. He then looked at the fossils found in the rock and found that they were the same early on in the fossil record but later changed and became more and more different. (He knew that the animals found in these countries were different in the present day.) He was intrigued as his findings would mean that the landmasses were once joined together and had later split apart into there present locations. He started to look for the fossils of tropical climate animals and plants in present day cold climate latitudes and found them. He concluded this was evidence that the land masses had moved over time.

His ideas were not well received as there was no clear way whole continents could move. The science community scoffed at his ideas as it was logically ridiculous that whole continents could move without some huge energy source to drive it. That was until the 1960's and the discovery of the mid-Atlantic ridge a series of volcanoes under the sea which are spewing out new rock a phenomenon known as ocean floor spreading. The movement of the continents is due to convection currents in the mantle driven by nuclear fusion reactions which were unheard of in Wegener's time.

Answer 2

Wegener used several pieces of evidence to support his theory of continental drift, including the fit of the continents like a jigsaw puzzle, matching rock formations and mountain ranges across continents, distribution of fossils that indicated past connections between continents, and glacial evidence that suggested a common ice age in different locations.