Continental drift | EPFL Graph Search

Continental drift is the hypothesis that the Earth's continents have moved over geologic time relative to each other, thus appearing to have "drifted" across the ocean bed. The idea of continental drift has been subsumed into the science of plate tectonics, which studies the movement of the continents as they ride on plates of the Earth's lithosphere. The speculation that continents might have "drifted" was first put forward by Abraham Ortelius in 1596. A pioneer of the modern view of mobilism was the Austrian geologist Otto Ampferer. The concept was independently and more fully developed by Alfred Wegener in his 1915 publication, "The Origin of Continents and Oceans". However, at that time the hypothesis was rejected by many for lack of any motive mechanism. The English geologist Arthur Holmes later proposed mantle convection for that mechanism. Early modern Netherlandish cartography and geography Abraham Ortelius , Theodor Christoph Lilienthal (1756), Alexander von Humboldt (1801 and 1845), Antonio Snider-Pellegrini , and others had noted earlier that the shapes of continents on opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean (most notably, Africa and South America) seem to fit together. W. J. Kious described Ortelius' thoughts in this way: Abraham Ortelius in his work Thesaurus Geographicus ... suggested that the Americas were "torn away from Europe and Africa ... by earthquakes and floods" and went on to say: "The vestiges of the rupture reveal themselves if someone brings forward a map of the world and considers carefully the coasts of the three [continents]." In 1889, Alfred Russel Wallace remarked, "It was formerly a very general belief, even amongst geologists, that the great features of the earth's surface, no less than the smaller ones, were subject to continual mutations, and that during the course of known geological time the continents and great oceans had, again and again, changed places with each other." He quotes Charles Lyell as saying, "Continents, therefore, although permanent for whole geological epochs, shift their positions entirely in the course of ages.

A new perspective on the punching resistance of edge columns with and without shear reinforcement applying refined measurement techniques

Aurelio Muttoni, Diego Hernández Fraile

Despite edge columns being instrumental components of flat slabs, most punching research has focused on internal connections. Several particularities of edge columns, such as load eccentricity and moment transfer, require additional experimental investigat ...

Fédération Internationale du Béton (fib)2022

Preprocessing Antarctic Weather Station (AWS) data in python

Michael Lehning, Franziska Gerber

There are many sources providing atmospheric weather station data for the Antarctic continent. However, variable naming, timestamps and data types are highly variable between the different sources. The published python code intends to make processing of di ...

EPFL Infoscience2022

Moored observations of turbulent mixing events in deep Lake Garda, Italy

Sebastiano Piccolroaz, Marco Toffolon

Deep water circulation and mixing processes are responsible for the transport of matter, nutrients and pollutants in deep lakes. Nevertheless, detailed continuous observations are rarely available. To overcome some of these deficiencies and with the aim of ...

2021