Books: Coast to Coast?

CONTINENTS IN MOTION: THE NEW EARTH DEBATE by WALTER SULLIVAN

397 pages. Illustrated. McGraw-Hill. $17.95.

During World War I, while a young German officer lay in a hospital recuperating from his wounds, he passed the time looking at maps and pondering the remarkable way in which the opposing sides of the Atlantic seemed to fit together. Alfred Wegener was not the first to notice that the bulging coastline of Brazil is a reciprocal of the west coast of Africa. For centuries scientists and cartographers speculated that a single large continent, which came to be called Pangea, had broken up into huge fragments...

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