The story of Plate Tectonics is the story of continents drifting from place to place, breaking apart, colliding, and grinding against each other (Story pp). It is also the story of terrestrial mountain ranges rising up while being pushed together, of oceans opening and closing, of undersea mountain chains girdling the planet like seams on a baseball, and of violent earthquakes and fiery volcanoes (Story pp). Plate Tectonics describes the intricate design of a complex, living planet in a state of dynamic flux (Story pp).

             Examination of the globe usually results in the observation that most of the continents seem to fit together like a puzzle (Plate pp). For example, the west African coastline appears to snuggle into the eat coast of South America and the Caribbean sea, and a similar fit appears across the Pacific (Plate pp). The fit is even more evident when the submerged continental shelves are compared rather than the coastlines (Plate pp). .

             In 1912, Alfred Wegener, 1880-1930, noticed this same thing and proposed that the continents were once compressed into a single proto-continent that he called Pangaea, meaning "all lands," and over time they have drifted apart into their current distribution (Plate pp). Wegener believed that Pangaea was intact until about 300 million years ago during the late Carboniferous period, when it started to break up and drift apart (Plate pp). However, his hypothesis lacked a geological mechanism to explain how the continents could drift across the earth's surface as he proposed (Plate pp). Wegener's inability to provide an adequate explanation of the forces responsible for continental drift and the prevailing belief that the earth was solid and immovable resulted in the scientific dismissal of his theories (Plate pp). .

             In 1929, Arthur Holmes elaborated on one of Wegener's many hypotheses with the idea that the mantle undergoes thermal convection, and this repeated heating and cooling results in a current that may be enough to cause continents to move, yet his idea received little attention until the 1960's (Plate pp).