THE SHAPES AND SIZES of the continents are continually changing, though extremely slowly. The earliest maps of the south Atlantic Ocean showed a remarkable fit between the shapes of the coastlines on either side. It took time to understand what kind of mechanism could move the continents to make this happen (pp. 36-37). It is now known that the continents are moving, and the rate - only a few centimetres a year- can be measured. In 1915 Alfred Wegener (1880-1930) published his theory of drifting continents. This told of an ancient “supercontinent" that scientists called Pangaea. When Pangaea started to break up some 300 million years ago (abbreviated to 300 Ma), the Atlantic Ocean began grow in the place where Africa split away from South America. Eduard Suess (p. 42) proposed that the southern continent be called Gondwanaland, after a region inhabited by the Gonds in India. Slightly later, the northern continent Laurasia was split apart to separate North America from Europe, isolating Greenland. It seems that the Earth's processes continually either split supercontinents apart or move continents together to make supercontinents, in cyclic events that take hundreds of million of years to complete