ETYMOLOGY OF PANGEA

Against the fixity of continents Wegener published (in German) two journal articles in 1912 and a book, Die Entstehung der Kontinente und Ozeane, with maps, in 1915 (with fully revised editions appearing in 1920, 1922, and 1929). Paleoclimalogical evidence is given of true polar wanderings. Such motions in the past are invoked to have caused an Earth-enveloping, thin, primordial sial-shell to split into slabs. These by irreversible collisions that rotated them toward the vertical, left the sima in which they are buoyant, widely uncovered about a "primordial continental block" that was itself thick enough to be emergent in an originally Earth-enveloping "Panthalassa" (all-ocean, as by Eduard Suess in 1893, and calculated to have been 2.64 km deep by Albrecht Penck in 1921). Wegener's "displacement theory" is that the present continents are drifting-apart blocks of a primordial continent in existence during the Carboniferous. Wegener in the 1922 (3rd German) edition of his book, in one place, refers to "the pangea" (in German: die Pangäa) in which, during the Carboniferous, the American block is part. J. G. A. Skerl, in 1924, in his English translation of this sentence leaves Pangea capitalized (as are all nouns in German) but as the word in context is not a proper noun, it does not appear in the index. It is John William Evans (President of the Geological Society of London, 1924-1926) who in his introduction to The Origin of the Continents and Oceans, 1924, converts "Pangæa" into a proper name.