AMERICA AND AFRICA

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 4, Issue 171, 22 October 1941, Page 6

AMERICA AND AFRICA

EVIDENCE THAT THEY WERE ONCE ONE Were South America and Africa fit one time bolh part of one great land mass? British scientists have recently discovered in Sierra Leone and the Gold Coast a rare mineral hitherto found only in Brazil. The mineral, Gorceixite, has no value in itself, although it is a good "indicator" that diamonds are about. The new discovery is accepted as further evidence that the great bulge of the Brazilian coastline onec fitted snugly into the vast bay in the African coast on the other side of the Atlantic. It is regarded as a very useful contribution to the theory that the entire land mass of the world once fitted together like a gigantic jigsaw puzzle. This theory of Continental Drift, or the migration of the continents, is advanced to explain the origin of continents and oceans. It maintains that, aeons ago in geological time, there was one vast continent known bs "Angaea," completely surrounded by water. The earth's rotation and gravitational pull of the sun and moon broke it up into individual blocks, which drifted apart in :* westerly direction until they became the continents shown 011 our maps. This drifting movement is certainly going on to-day. Observations and measurements of the stars definitely prove that Greenland is moving away from Scotland by about GO feet each year, while the distance between Washington and Paris is increasing by about one foot a year, or more than 50 feet since the Atlantic cable was laid. It was in the striking similarity of the Brazilian and African coastline that the theory had its starting point. Its supporters point to the map which, southward of this bulge and curve, show projections on the one side corresponding to similarly shaped bays on the other. Other parts of the world, they maintain, can be joined together in like fashion: the Atlantic seaboard of North America will match up witli Western Europe, and North Western Africa, with Greenland filling the gap between Norway and the North-east coast of Canada. India fits into East Africa at Zanzibar, New Zealand into the eastern coast of Australia and the resulting block into the African-Indian mass. The result, they argue, is the solid continent of Angaea. The theorists say that it is the shifting weight of this vast land mass which lias pulled the earth

over on to its present axis, and thereby caused the great climatic changes of the past. Glacial rocks on the equator, which indicate that this zone was once frozen like the

Polar regions, arc thus satisfactorily explained by the l theory. The gorceixite pebbles in West Airica were found by Dr N. R. J<unner, an Australian, and Director of the Gold Coast Geological Survey. He forwarded samples for report to the Imperial Institute, London, established the idcntilj* of the mineral and arc about to publish an account of the discovery in their bulletin.