Paragraph on “The Continents” complete paragraph for Class 9, Class 10, Class 11 and Class 12

The Continents

Twenty nine percent of the Earth’s surface is land and about 200 million years ago it was a single mass surrounded by the oceans called ‘Pangaea’. In the year 1912 a German meteorologist called Alfred Wegener suggested that this single mass of land was in reality located above large flat pieces of rock. called ‘plates’, which had large cracks m them. With the passage of time, about 130 million years ago, these large plates be to shift and float on the molten lava which lay below them, this gradual shifting broke up the land mass above into various pieces thus forming the continents. This theory was called the theory of ‘Continental Drift’.

Evidence of this has been seen in the form of large under-sea ridges located in the Atlantic Ocean and elsewhere on the Earth. It is further substantiated by the fact that the eastern coastline of North and South America are of the same shape us the western coastlines of Europe and Africa, as shown in the illustration. As time went by these separate land masses took the shape of the continents as we see them today.

Today we have seven continents i.e. North America, South America, Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia and The Antartica. Whereas on one hand the movement of the plates shifted various pieces of land in different directions, it also helped in bringing smaller pieces of land together to form one single mass. As an example North and South America were separate pieces of land which over a period of time joined with each other forming a single mass of land.

We still have many smaller islands as in the South Pacific which are located separately. The Oceans also took their toll on the edge, of these land masses which explains their shapes today. This activity of shifting is still continuing at a rate of one to ten centimetres in a year and is one of the reasons why we have earthquakes.