Advances in Conception about Earthquakes - Earthquake Engineering for Structural Design - page 106

Perfect fitting from
configuration, geological,
plants and animalfossils
point of view

Figure 4.4 The well-known South America and Africa jigsaw (modified after
Bokor, 2007)

earthquakes were caused by a sudden slippage in the fault, in the upper part of the
Earth. According to Reid's view, knowing the elastic rebound theory, after an
earthquake takes place, stress again starts to accumulate in the rocks. Thus, it
means that, in a simplest form, the earthquake should take place at regular intervals
(Ashida, 1996). Reid's theory was the first accounting for a proper explanation of
earthquake generation. But this theory did not explain the formation of the faults.
A comprehensive theory about the actual position of continents was for the first
time elaborated by the German meteorologist Alfred Wegener (1880-1930) in his
book The Origin of Continents and Oceans , published in 1915 (Frater, 1998). He
noted the remarkable fit of the South American and African continents (Fig. 4.4)
and clearly identified geological occurrences on matching the coastlines of these
two continents from the point of view of geological structures (mountain belts and
mineral deposits) as well as of common plants and animal fossils. The break-up of
lithosphere produced the two different continents, Africa and South America (Fig.
4.5). Many scientists of 18

th th

Centuries, such as Benjamin Franklin, James
Hutton, Alexander von Humboldt , etc., studied the problem of the Earth's

and 19