Hua Feng knew about the origin of the continents, and the geophysicist A. Dutott was the subject of the geologist. L. Du Toit, in 1937 in his book Our Drifting Continents, proposed a model of the existence of two primitive continents on Earth.

If this model is true, then the two primordial continents would be called La

asia) and Gondwana Gulu (Go

dw****a

d), this is in fact the same as Wegener and others have argued, and the global continent is only one ancient continent.

According to Dutot, the two primordial continents were originally formed near the Earth's poles, with the ancient continent of Laoya in the north and the ancient land of Gondwana in the south, and after they formed, they gradually broke up and drifted to the location of today's continental mass.

As early as the end of the 19th century, geologist E. Hughes studied under the study of Hughes. Suess has recognized that the geological formations of the continents in the southern hemisphere of the Earth are very similar and merged them into a single palaeocontinent for study, calling it Gondwana Paleocontinent, a name derived from the name of a standard stratigraphic area in central eastern India (Go

dwa

a）。

The Gondwana continent included present-day South America, Africa, the island of Madagascar, the Arabian Peninsula, the Indian Peninsula, the island of Sri Lanka, Antarctica, Australia, and New Zealand. They were all formed in the same geological age, and the same species of plant fossils are present in the rock formations, known as Gondwana rocks.

The main evidence used by Dutote to prove the existence and drift of the ancient continents of Laoya and Gondwana comes from geology, paleontology and paleoclimatology. Based on the data accumulated over more than 30 years, it is strongly proved that Gondwana's theory is basically correct.

The ancient continent of Laoya is a combination of Europe, Asia, and North America, and these landmasses are not very far apart even now. The ancient continent of Laoya has a very complex history of formation and evolution, which is mainly formed by the merger of several ancient land masses, including the PaleoNorth American landmass, the PaleoEuropean landmass, the Paleo-Siberian landmass, and the Paleo-Chinese landmass.

During the Late Paleozoic (about 300 million years ago), these paleolandmasses gradually collided with each other, and gradually closed between the early and middle Carboniferous and the Permian (i.e., 200 million to 270 million years ago).

Paleogelogical, paleoclimatic and paleontological data show that the Laoya paleocontinent was located in the middle and low latitude zone during the Carboniferous~Permian period. After the Mesozoic Era (i.e., in the last 1-200 million years), the continent of Laoya gradually broke and disintegrated, leading to the expansion of the North Atlantic.

The results show that the formation and distribution of new orogenic zones in the world are the tectonic results of the rupture and drift of the Laoya and Gondwana ancient continents.

In this process, the law of the uneven westward movement and off-polar movement of the continental rock mass is very obvious. In general, the Laoya Palaeocontinent was once located in the mid-high latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere, while the Gondwana Palaeocontinent was once located near the South Pole in the Southern Hemisphere, and the two continents were separated by an area known as the Paleo-Mediterranean (also known as the Tethys Trough).

Before Dutot (1937) proposed the theory of Laoa and Gondwana

e

As early as 1912, the theory that there was once only one primordial continent on Earth, called the United Ancient Continent, was proposed. Wegener believes that it was formed during the Carboniferous period (about 220 million to 270 million years ago).

Wegener took the United Ancient Continent as the starting point for his description of continental drift. However, according to the current understanding, Wegener's proposed Union of the Ancient Continent was by no means a primitive continent. Although a large number of people still agree with the joint paleocontinent view, their paleocontinent reconstruction map is very different from Wegener's reconstruction map, and on the contrary, it is somewhat close to Dutot's theory of the distribution of the two ancient continents.

Continental drift and plate movements over the last 200 million years have been well documented and widely recognized. However, some speculate that plate movements may have begun as early as 3 billion years ago, and that the speed of plate movement varied in different geological periods, with repeated collisions and assemblies between continents, as well as repeated fractures and separations.

Numerous collisions of continental rocks form folded mountain ranges, which are joined together to form new continents, and new oceanic basins are formed by the expansion of the ocean floor.

Therefore, it is very difficult to accurately reconstruct the so-called "drift before drifting" of the continent more than 200 million years ago. The age of the Earth is 4.6 billion years, and the oldest rocks on Earth are known to be 4.374 billion years old, and they are distributed over a fairly small area. Thus, from 4.6 billion to 3.7 billion years, there is an interval of about 900 million years where geological data is completely absent. In addition, the geological record of the Earth 2.5 billion years ago is also very limited, which makes it difficult to study the early history of the Earth.

The study of the origin and evolution of the ocean began at the beginning of this century, and before that, it was generally believed that the oceanic basin was a permanent form on the earth's surface, that is, the location and distribution pattern of the oceanic basin were fixed since the formation of water storage. With the development of earth science, especially the revolutionary theory of continental drift led by Wegener at the beginning of this century, there has been a breakthrough understanding of the origin and evolution of the ocean since the last 200 million years.

The theory of continental drift was not supported by many people at the beginning, because the mechanism that caused continental drift, that is, the problem of force sources, was not well solved at that time.

In 1931, Holmes et al. proposed the theory of mantle convection to explain the source of force for continental drift, but this idea received little attention at the time.

In the late 19th century, the global tectonic theory of the Earth's shrinkage was established to explain why there was such a massive orogeny on Earth.

However, after the 50s of this century, with the discovery of evidence of the huge tension of the rift valleys in the global ocean, the shrinkage theory was generally abandoned, and at the same time, the theory of earth expansion soon became popular. The expansion theory holds that the Earth started out small, half the diameter of the Earth today.

As a result of the massive expansion of the earth, the original crust split into the current continent, and the cracked area continued to develop into the modern ocean basin. Moreover, the so-called continental drift caused by the massive expansion of the Earth indicates that the continental masses have remained largely in place, i.e., there has been no significant movement between the continents or between the continents relative to the mantle.

Since the swelling theory could not explain how the tectonic features of the folded mountains that developed extensively on the continental crust were formed, the mantle convection theory of Holmes et al. soon came back into focus.

In the early 60s, with the rapid accumulation of ocean floor sounding data, H. H. Hess and R. Dietz S. Dietz was the first to develop the mantle convection scheme into the doctrine of seafloor spreading. In 1962, Hess published the article "The History of the Ocean Basin", which proposed a new view of the origin of the ocean, the theory of seafloor spreading.

Hess believed that the main structure of the ocean floor is a direct manifestation of mantle convection. The theory of seafloor spreading proves that the continents and ocean floor move passively in the convective mantle, unlike the early theory of continental drift, which advocates that the continents actively drift on the ocean floor. Soon after the theory of seafloor spreading was proposed, other observations of the ocean floor, such as the structure of the ocean floor crust, geomagnetism, seismic sources and geothermal flux distribution, provided strong evidence for this theory.

In this case, most scholars have turned to the study of seafloor expansion. It is now generally recognized that the theory of ocean floor expansion and plate movement can be used to explain the origin and evolution of oceans, and that the fixed theory of ocean basins appears to be outdated. The theoretical explanations of the origin and evolution of the oceans by seafloor spreading and plate tectonics are based on the mantle convection theory.

Modern research confirms that oceans were originally conceived in the interior of continents and began in rift valleys in the continental lithosphere. The continents break apart at the rift valley and separate from each other, thus beginning to create new oceanic basins. Wegener once used the kissing of the two opposite sides of the South Atlantic as the starting point for the theory of continental drift.

In fact, if the two continents of South America and Africa are put together, not only do the terrain contours of the continental margins match very well, but the rock types and geological formations can also be connected. It has been proven that the Atlantic Ocean did not exist at the time of the Permian (250 million years ago), and it is estimated that the continental rift that formed the Mid-Atlantic Ocean occurred later in the Triassic (about 160 million to 190 million years ago).

By the end of the Jurassic (about 120 million years ago), the Mid-Atlantic Ocean may have opened up to 1,000 kilometers wide, the South Atlantic opened about 1,000 kilometers wide, the South Atlantic opened about the Early Cretaceous (about 110 million years ago), the first rift valleys occurred in the Late Jurassic (about 130 million years ago), the North Atlantic opened the latest, about the beginning of the Tertiary (about 60 million to 70 million years ago), and at the same time, the Norwegian Sea opened up from the North Atlantic rift valley to the northeast and into Greenland and Europe.

From 60 million to 20 million years ago, the Norwegian Sea, the Baffin Sea, and the main body of the North Atlantic expanded, but at some rate and direction.

In summary, today's vast ocean basins are not the result of long-term Earth movements and evolution. The development of the ocean from narrow bays to wide basins is achieved through a process of massive seafloor spreading that continues to occur. Both seafloor spreading and plate movement are driven by mantle convection.

Since the formation of the earth's primitive crust, it has never stopped the movement of large-scale geological tectonic formations. Therefore, it is safe to say that the current shape of the Earth's oceans and land is the result of large-scale crustal movements over the past hundreds of millions of years.

Paleontologists have discovered ancient creatures dating back 635 million years to the Obabin sea scorpions, the earliest creatures on Earth that lived much like today's sponges, with roots rooted in the ocean floor and filtering food particles from the water.

Fossils record the earliest appearance of life on Earth about 3.5 billion years ago. Some experts have suggested that how life on Earth came into being is still one of the unsolved mysteries of the scientific community.

According to Charles Darwin's speculation in 1871, early life may have started in a small warm pond, but other scientists have suggested that early life may have existed in more mineral-rich water environments, such as hot hydrothermal surges, but recently a group of scientists has proposed another theory that life may have originated in very cold places, and that some contingencies contributed to the formation of organic matter in the inorganic environment.