S. Warren Carey (1958) first showed that there is an excellent visual fit between the submarine contours of western Africa and eastern South America. That there was so much controversy about its existence is attributable to several factors. Among them may have been the early maps of Alfred Wegener (1924) that suggested the fit was not particularly good, inadequate knowledge of submarine topography that may have prevented geologists like Alexander du Toit (1937) and Lester King (1950) from making accurate diagrams of the continental edges, the occasional erroneous belief that the coastline was the continental edge, and a reluctance to accept Carey's semiquantitative evidence.
Were the Earth a sphere, then two identical continental margins could be brought into coincidence by a single finite rotation around an axis through the Earth's center. The diametrically opposite points where the axis cuts the surface are known as the rotation poles. This property of rotations on a sphere is due...
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Smith, A.G. (1987). Continental drift, morphological evidence . In: Structural Geology and Tectonics. Encyclopedia of Earth Science. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-31080-0_13
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