Wegener suggested that perhaps the rotation of the Earth caused the continents to shift towards and apart from each other. Today, we know that the continents rest on massive slabs of rock called tectonic plates. The plates are always moving and interacting in a process called plate tectonics.

The Earth’s continents are in constant motion. On at least three occasions, they have all collided to form one giant continent. If history is a guide, the current continents will coalesce once again to form another supercontinent.

The continents fit together like pieces of a puzzle. This is how they looked 250 million years ago. Find a map of the continents and cut each one out. Alfred Wegener proposed that the continents were once united into a single supercontinent named Pangaea, meaning all earth in ancient Greek.

Just as our continents were once all connected in the supercontinent known as Pangea (which separated roughly 200 million years ago), scientists predict that in approximately 200-250 million years from now, the continents will once again come together.

Pangaea or Pangea ( /pænˈdʒiːə/) was a supercontinent that existed during the late Paleozoic and early Mesozoic eras. It assembled from earlier continental units approximately 335 million years ago, and began to break apart about 175 million years ago.

All of the planets, except for Earth, were named after Greek and Roman gods and godesses. The name Earth is an English/German name which simply means the ground. It comes from the Old English words ‘eor(th)e’ and ‘ertha’.

America is named after Amerigo Vespucci, the Italian explorer who set forth the then revolutionary concept that the lands that Christopher Columbus sailed to in 1492 were part of a separate continent. He included on the map data gathered by Vespucci during his voyages of 1501-1502 to the New World.