ame ashore as a mammoth breaker.
By the 1960's, the idea of continental drift was regarded as the most important new idea in geology. The theory of continental drift--or plate tectonics, as it was soon called, held that hot molten rock rose from inside the earth to form a new seafloor, which forces the continents of Europe and Africa to shift in one direction, and the continents of North and South America to move in an opposite direction. Although tectonics is the art of constructing things from smaller pieces, plate tectonics is the way nature has created the surface of the earth from a number of smaller plates.
To appreciate the relationship between continental drift and earthquakes, it may be useful to understand how continents move on the surface of the earth. The planet earth, like an onion, has several layers; the outermost layer, or crust (on which we live); the mantle, beneath the crust is approximately 1800 miles thick; and below the mantle, the earth's core comprised of an inner core and an outer core. The earth's crust is not one piece; it
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