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by Margot Shales • illustrated by Steve Gardner

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Photo Credits: Cover, Gary Braasch/Corbis; p. 3, Ric Ergenbright/Corbis; p. 7 (t) Bettmann/Corbis;

p.7 (c), Hulyon-Deutsch Collection/Corbis; p. 7 (b), Archive Photos

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ISBN 0-15-323446-6

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1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 947 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01
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by Mar got Shales • illustrated by Steve Gardner

Chapters
Mountains of Questions . . . . . . . . . . 2
Catch My Drift?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
When Plates Collide . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
An Earth-Moving Glossary. . . . . . . . 16

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Mountains of Questions
Stretching along the west coast of North America from
southern Canada into northern California is a long range
of mountains called the Cascades. The Cascade range has
more than a dozen volcanoes.
Nearly all the volcanoes in the Cascades are either
extinct (no longer active) or dormant (erupting only once
in a great while). One of those dormant volcanoes, Mount
St. Helens, woke up and erupted on March 27, 1980. In a
remote part of Washington state, Mount St. Helens blasted
columns of ash as high as
11,000 feet, dropping it on
Mt. Baker
cities hundreds of miles away.
Glacier
Peak The photograph on the cover
of this book shows the Mount
Mt. Ranier St. Helens eruption.
Mt. St. Helens Another volcano, in
Mt. Adams
Oregon, is called Crater Lake.
Mt. Hood
This lake is actually a crater—a
Mt. Jefferson hollowed-out area around a
Three Sisters
volcano’s opening—from a vol-
Newberry
Mt.Thielsen
Caldera cano that literally blew its top
Crater Lake more than 6,000 years ago.
Mt. Mcloughlin
Over time, the crater filled with
Mt. Shasta
water, creating the lake.

Lassen Peak

2
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Volcanic mountain ranges such as the Cascades

once raised numerous questions for geologists,
scientists who study Earth. For example: What are
volcanoes? Why are they often located in groups? Why
do volcanoes and earthquakes often occur in the same
areas?
Of course, many other related questions also kept
scientists scratching their heads for many centuries,
including: How are mountains formed? How do the fos-
sils of sea animals get inside mountain rock—thousands
of feet above the sea? Why do we find the same kinds of
rocks and fossils on different continents, such as Africa
and South America, that are separated by oceans?

3
323446_pg04.ps 6/6/01 1:24 PM Page 4 (Yellow
(Magenta
(Cyan
(Blackplate)
plate)
plate)
plate)

Areas of Earthquake Activity

Dark gray shading indicates the danger areas.

Areas of Volcanic Activity

Dark gray shading indicates the danger areas.

4
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As recently as a hundred years ago, geologists had

no answers to these questions. Much of Earth was still a
puzzle.
Once, the main theory about how mountains are
formed was that the “skin” of Earth was shrinking. Have
you ever seen how the skin of a rotting apple wrinkles up
as its sides fall in, forming ridges and pits? Geologists
thought that Earth was like that apple and that its crust—
the “skin”—was shrinking. They supposed that this was
because Earth was cooling down. A ridge was a mountain
range, and a pit, or cavity, held an ocean or sea.
The “shrinking skin” theory seemed to answer a lot of
questions. For instance, as Earth’s skin wrinkled up, the
theory said, the ocean drained away from high places such
as mountains. Lots of sea animals were left without water
and died on dry land. This explained why their fossils
were found at the tops of mountains far from the sea.
The theory also suggested that the draining water,
because of the shrinking skin, exposed land bridges
between continents. Animals searching for edible material
could have crossed these bridges in an ancient migration.
This explained why fossils of the same animals were found
on continents separated by an ocean.
Despite the fact that many scientists liked the “shrink-
ing skin” theory, there were questions it didn’t answer.
For example, why did continents that were oceans apart
contain the same kinds of rocks? Animals migrate in
search of territory or nourishing food, but rocks do not.

5
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Pangaea

250 million years ago

Laurasia

Gondwana

130 million years ago

65 million years ago

Eurasia
North
America
Africa
South Australia
America

Antarctica
present

6
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Finally, along came a man named

Alfred Wegener (1880–1930), a German
scientist with an idea that, in time, would
explain everything. The only trouble was
that few people believed him.
Around the turn of the twentieth cen-
tury, Wegener noticed an odd thing about Alfred Wegener
the continents of South America and
Africa. The coasts that faced each other
across the Atlantic Ocean seem to fit
together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.
Even stranger, if he took the shapes of all
the continents and cut them out like a
puzzle, he could piece them all together.
The fit wasn’t perfect, but to Wegener it Eduard Suess
seemed too close to be mere coincidence.
Perhaps, Wegener thought, at one
time all continents were one huge super-
continent. He called this continent
Pangaea, which means “all land.”
Wegener wasn’t the first person to
notice the snug fit of South America and Francis Bacon
Africa. The English scientist Francis Bacon
had been curious about it as early as 1620. Later, in the
early 1900s, a geologist named Eduard Suess noted that all
the southern continents shared the same rock formations.
He suggested that these continents had all been part of a
giant southern continent at one time; he named that
ancient land mass Gondwanaland.
7
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Catch My Drift?
Wegener was one of the first scientists to say that all the
continents—not just the southern ones—had once been
connected. What’s more, he was the first with an idea
about why this super-continent might have broken up into
smaller continents.
Wegener believed the continents moved very slowly,
maybe only an inch or two each year. One way to think
about continents—and to understand Wegener’s theory—
is to compare the continents to enormous ice floes on
an almost frozen sea. Over time, the tides in the ocean
beneath broke the ice away from a polar ice cap. Each ice
floe was carried in a different direction by the tide and the
ocean.
Just as those huge cakes of ice were once part of a polar
ice cap, the continents were once part of one landmass.
Continents, Wegener said, were adrift on a foundation of
moving rock—a lower level of Earth’s crust. Yes, Wegener
suggested, the continents and mountains do seem “hard as
rock,” but maybe the lower levels of Earth’s crust aren’t
quite as solid as the surface.
He also theorized that some mountain ranges might
have been created when continents crashed together. He
suggested that India, once separate from the rest of Asia,
moved north. Where it bumped into Asia, it produced the
Himalayan mountain range. Furthermore, couldn’t all
mountains have been formed over time by continents
crashing together? Wegener called his theory continental
drift.
8
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Russia

Afghanistan China

Pakistan

Nepal Laos

India Burma
Arabian
Sea
Bangladesh
Thailand
Bay of
Bengal

Though many people found Wegener’s idea interest-

ing, many more thought the “shrinking skin” theory made
more sense. Some scientists pointed out that rock is too
rigid and strong to be moved around as Wegener sug-
gested. He could not prove, after all, that Earth’s crust had
a less-solid level far below the surface.
Wegener couldn’t explain another puzzle either: What
kind of force inside Earth could move continents around
like ice floes on a northern sea? Wegener talked about
“tides” in Earth’s crust, but no one was convinced.

9
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At a 1928 meeting of geologists, when Wegener pre-

sented his ideas, the most important geologists of the day
attacked them. Because he couldn’t answer all their ques-
tions, the geologists tore apart Wegener’s theory until no
one believed it could be true. Two years after this discour-
aging reception, Wegener died during a trip to Greenland.
If he had lived another thirty years, he would have had
proof that he was right.
The proof came with the study of mid-ocean ridges in
the 1950s and 1960s. These ridges are actually underwater
mountain ranges, many thousands of miles long. The mid-
ocean ridges form a chain that circles the entire Earth.
While scientists had known about the mid-ocean ridges
for years, in the 1960s they discovered something new.
The sea floor on either side of these underwater mountain
ranges is spreading—the two sides are moving away from
each other. As the sea floor spreads apart, a volcano of
sorts forms. Molten rock bubbles up from under the sea
floor and fills the crack at the top of the mountain ridge.
This molten rock, called magma, rapidly cools and helps
rebuild the mountain range even as it is being pulled apart.
This fiery mountain-making process never stops, widening
the floor of the Atlantic Ocean by about an inch each year.
This discovery gave rise to a new theory, built upon
Wegener’s theory of continental drift. This new theory was
called plate tectonics. According to this theory, Earth’s
crust is made up of giant “plates” that fit together like a

10
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jigsaw puzzle. There are six large plates and about twelve
smaller ones, but the pieces of this puzzle are always mov-
ing and crashing into each other. Some move as fast as
three and a half inches a year, while others creep along at
less than half an inch a year. So Wegener was right: The
continents do move, and there are forces deep under-
ground that are slowly changing the face of the planet.

Continent Continent

Direction of
spreading
Mid-ocean
ridge

Sea
floor

Magma

11
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When Plates Collide

The movement of
Earth’s giant plates has
made the world we see
today. The plates break up
continents and drag them Mayou
to pieces. For example, Ma
the skinny finger of Baja
California, which forms
Pac
part of Mexico’s Pacific
Australian
coastline, exists because a Plate
plate is moving north.
That plate tore some land
away from the side of
Mexico. The movement
of plates also creates dry
land. The continents
Tectonic Plate Movement
themselves are sea floor
that has, over time, been pushed up out of the water by
tectonic movement. That explains why people discover
fossils of sea creatures so far from the sea. The plates even
build mountains. The Alps in Europe, the Andes in South
America, and even the Cascades are located where plates
crash into each other, crumpling up land and raising giant
peaks.
When two plates meet, one of three things can happen.
They can move away from each other, as they do at the
mid-ocean ridges. They can rub against each other, which

12
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European
North Surtsey
Plate
American
Plate

Pelee
Mauna Loa African
Plate
South
Pacific Plate Nazca American
Plate Plate

Antarctic
Plate

happens along some earthquake faults. The North

American plate and the Pacific plate slide against each
other along North America’s west coast. Every time the
plates slip, there is an earthquake—sometimes a violent
one. Finally, two plates can push against each other. When
this happens, one of the plates eventually is forced under
the other. The plate that rides up high crumples and wrin-
kles and forms a mountain range. The plate that gets
pushed down heats up and melts. Hot magma rises and
forces its way out of Earth’s crust. When the magma pours
out—usually in a big explosion—a volcano is born.

13
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Magma rises
through
volcano vent.

Ocean plate Continental plate

14 Plate breaks up and becomes magma.

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Why do volcanoes become dormant or extinct? That

process, too, is the result of plate movement. Because
the plates are always shifting, over time, a volcano actu-
ally moves away from the spot where it was born. The
magma that used to feed the original volcano then
begins to build a new volcano. The Hawaiian Islands
were formed in this way. They are actually the tops of a
range of volcanic mountains. If the mountains beneath
the Hawaiian Islands sat on the dry land of a continent,
they would be the tallest mountains on Earth.
As the plates move around, Earth’s surface changes.
What does the future hold in store? Some scientists have
a hypothesis: In another 50 million years, they say,
North and South America will split apart—and Africa
will crowd in on the Mediterranean Sea. According to
their theory, a piece of Africa will slide north into the
Indian Ocean, and California will split off from the rest
of North America—but it won’t fall into the ocean (as
people like to say). Instead, it will slide north and west
on a collision course with Alaska. Of course, these pre-
dictions are only speculation.
Earth is always remaking itself. It takes billions of
years, but sooner or later, the surface will become
“new” again. When an earthquake occurs or when a vol-
cano erupts, we are seeing plate tectonics in action. The
noise and shaking are signs of Earth renewing itself.

15
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An Earth-Moving Glossary
active volcanoes that are still producing ash and magma
and that occasionally erupt
continental drift Wegener’s theory that Earth once had
one gigantic land mass that, over time, broke into the
continents, which “drifted” into their current arrange-
ment
crater a hollowed-out area around a volcano’s opening
dormant volcanoes that are still active but rarely erupt
extinct volcanoes that no longer erupt
geologist a scientist who studies the earth and its history
lava magma that has found its way to Earth’s surface
magma molten rock, found in mid-ocean ridges and vol-
canoes; called lava once it appears above ground
mid-ocean ridge an underwater mountain range where
new sea floor forms
plate tectonics a theory that enor-
mous pieces, or “plates,” of
Earth’s crust are always
moving
volcano a mountainous
vent in Earth’s crust
that releases molten
rock

16
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Think and Respond

1 What is the purpose of the questions in the open-
ing section of the book?
2 To what does the author compare Earth in order
to make an early geological theory more under-
standable?
3 Summarize the main idea of this book in one
sentence.
4 How does the author’s description of plate tec-
tonics as a “jigsaw puzzle” help you understand
what plate tectonics means?
5 How is the author’s discussion of volcanoes in this
book similar to and different from another story
you have read about volcanoes or one of nature’s
other dramatic events?
6 If you lived near a dormant volcano, how would
this book change the way you viewed it?

Continental Drift Map Find out more

about the stages in continental drift from the
time that all the continents were one land
mass (Pangaea) to their present configuration. Draw a
map of three or four of the stages of continental drift.

School-Home Connection Tell a family

member what you learned about continental
drift and plate tectonics. Use a world map to help you
explain continental drift.