Continental drift Permian era but failing to account for glaciation in India, Australia and South Africa. Geophysicist Jack Oliver is credited with providing seismologic evidence supporting plate tectonics which encompassed and superseded continental drift with the article "Seismology and the New Global Tectonics", published in 1968, using data collected from seismologic stations, including those he set up in the South Pacific. It is now known that there are two kinds of crust: continental crust and oceanic crust. Continental crust is inherently lighter and its composition is different from oceanic crust, but both kinds reside above a much deeper "plastic" mantle. Oceanic crust
Continental drift Silurian – those of the Potsdam epoch. … and this will probably prove to the case in Primordial time with the other continents also". Dana was enormously influential in America – his "Manual of Mineralogy" is still in print in revised form – and the theory became known as "Permanence theory". This appeared to be confirmed by the exploration of the deep sea beds conducted by the Challenger expedition, 1872-6, which showed that contrary to expectation, land debris brought down by rivers to the ocean is deposited comparatively close to the shore on what is now known as the continental