First suggestion of continental drift

Looking at any world map it is obvious that the coastlines of west Africa and east South America match each other in shape. The first person to notice this is believed to be the Flemish mapmaker Abraham Ortelius (1527-1598). He believed that the two continents were once joined together before drifting apart. Continental drift only became accepted by mainstream academia in the last half of the twentieth century.

Ortelius’ allusion to what we would now call plate tectonics came in a discussion about the mythical lost city of Atlantis. He argued that the Island of Gadir (present-day Cadiz, Spain),

“will be the remaining part of the island of Atlantis of America – was was not sunk (as Plato reports in the Timaeus) so much as torn away from Europe and Africa, by earthquakes and flood – and accordingly will seem to be elongated toward the West. But if someone refers to this as making good one fiction by telling another, he has a right to do so, as far as I’m concerned. But the vestiges of the rupture reveal themselves, if someone brings forward a map of the world considers carefully the coasts of the three aforementioned parts of the Earth, where they face each other – I mean the projecting parts of Europe and Africa, of course, along with the recesses of America. The case is such that one might say, along with Book 2 of Strabo, that what Plato related concerning Atlantis, on the authority of Solon, was not an invention.”