PAN- 
AMERICAN GEOLOGIST 
VoL. XXXVII April, 1922 No. 3 
MAJOR FEATURES OF EARTH’S SURFACE" 
By Prop. Carl Dinner 
Vienna 
Many debatable questions concern the permanency of the con¬ 
tinental platforms and the ocean basins. These questions assume 
new turn by the recent hypothesis of Wegener, according to which, 
instead of the former sinking of great continents into abyssal 
depths, as accepted by many geologists, the land bridges demanded 
by the paleogeographers are thought never to have existed, but 
continental masses are regarded as having split apart and become 
widely separated because of horizontal creep of the lighter salic 
continental blocks over the deep-lying heavier Sima. 
Through the separation of America from Europe, the Atlantic 
Ocean arose, and in the same way anterior India and Australia 
were separated from the African block and shoved toward the 
northeast. The author then showed that the processes accepted 
by Wegener lead to striking contradictions with the proved results 
of paleogeographic investigations, but added that it was necessary 
to proceed much more carefully in the making of paleogeographic 
reconstructions than had been done in many cases. The shoving 
of India northeast across the Indian Ocean is contradicted by the 
1 Translated from the German; with notes and comments (in brackets) by Charles 
Schuchert. The summary originally appeared in the Mitteilungen d. k. k. geol. Ge- 
sellsch. in Wien, LVIII Bd., pp. 268-270, and 329-349. 
177 
