Answer:
The theory of continental drift was originally proposed in 1912 by the German meteorologist and geophysicist Alfred Wegener (1880-1930), who formulated it based, among other things, on the way in which the shapes of the continents on each side of the Atlantic Ocean like Africa and South America seemed to fit, what Benjamin Franklin and others had already noticed. It also took into account the distribution of certain geological formations and the fossil record of the northern continents, which stated that they could have shared floras and faunas in earlier geological times. With these data, Wegener calculated that the set of current continents were united in a remote past of the Earth, forming a supercontinent, called Pangea, which means "the whole earth" in Greek. This approach was initially ruled out by most of his colleagues, since his theory lacked a mechanism to explain the drift of the continents. In his original thesis, he proposed that the continents move on another denser layer of the Earth, which formed the ocean floor and that extended beneath them, in the same way that a carpet is moved. However, the enormous force of friction involved motivated the rejection of Wegener's explanation and the suspension, as an interesting but not proven hypothesis, of the idea of continental displacement. In synthesis, the continental drift is the slow and continuous displacement of the continental masses.
