Word: gondwanaland
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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About 150 million years ago, during the breakup of a supercontinent that geologists call Gondwanaland,* South America and Africa began to drift apart, creating the Atlantic Ocean. There is convincing evidence for the once controversial theory that the two continents were once joined; geological features and fossil remains on opposite sides of the ocean show a remarkable match, and the shelves, or underwater plateaus, extending from each of the continents into the Atlantic form a near perfect fit, like adjacent pieces in a jigsaw puzzle. One piece of the puzzle, however, seemed to be missing. There was a deep indentation...
...just above the bedrock, the geologists deduced that 150 to 200 million years ago, the Falkland plateau was dry land in a climate similar to that of the Mediterranean today. That evidence fitted in with earlier suggestions by other geologists that there had once been an inland sea in Gondwanaland similar to the Mediterranean and bounded by what are now South America, Africa and Antarctica. Then, as the continents began to separate, the area round the ancient sea gradually sank, reached its present depth about 80 million years ago, and remained hidden until the spring voyage of the Glomar Challenger...