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Who first proposed that Pangea existed?
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Pangea
Distribution of landmasses, mountainous regions, shallow seas, and deep ocean basins near the end of the Permian Period. Included in the paleogeographic reconstruction are the locations of the interval's subduction zones.
The existence of the supercontinent Pangea was first proposed in 1912 by the German meteorologist Alfred Wegener.123
Wegener introduced the concept as a central component of his theory of continental drift, which he formally presented in lectures in 1912 and later detailed in his 1915 book, The Origin of Continents and Oceans. While other scientists had previously speculated that continents were once joined, they often attributed the separation of landmasses to the sinking or subsidence of large areas of crust into the oceans. In contrast, Wegener proposed that the continents had been part of a single, large landmass that subsequently broke apart and moved thousands of miles across the globe over geologic time.1432