How to Use continental drift in a Sentence

continental drift

noun

• Didn’t have much to do, what with his offense moving like continental drift.
  — Nick Canepacolumnist, San Diego Union-Tribune, 23 Oct. 2022
• Two hundred million years ago, with the continental drift?
  — Marion Renault, The New Republic, 6 Oct. 2020
• Finding the Ancient Fish Thanks to continental drift, the world was a different place some 360 million years ago, when H. udlezinye ruled lakes and estuaries.
  — Matt Hrodey, Discover Magazine, 7 Mar. 2023
• The heat is from Earth’s molten interior, which causes continental drift.
  — Caroline Delbert, Popular Mechanics, 15 Mar. 2021
• The transient weather, the forces reshaping the world every day, but also the permanent nature of continental drift and how this all fits together, the enormity of it.
  — Anchorage Daily News, 23 June 2019
• When continental drift broke Pangaea apart, the ginkgo vanished from North America.
  — Clive Thompson, The Atlantic, 9 Oct. 2020
• States will continue to shift their political allegiance at roughly the pace of continental drift.
  — Walter Shapiro, The New Republic, 28 Nov. 2022
• As late as 1958, a book rejecting continental drift included a foreword by Albert Einstein.
  — Cody Cottier, Discover Magazine, 18 Feb. 2021
• This causes different things—not just earthquakes and volcanoes, but also continental drift and the consequent destruction and recreation of crust.
  — Caroline Delbert, Popular Mechanics, 9 Dec. 2020
• Scientists also were trying to resolve debates about continental drift, the idea that continents slowly move along Earth’s surface.
  — Gary Robbins, sandiegouniontribune.com, 1 Sep. 2017
• What’s so super about it: Sometimes spelled Pangea, this mighty mashup was first proposed by German continental drift enthusiast Wegener in the early 20th century.
  — Gemma Tarlach, Discover Magazine, 11 June 2019
• As the continent slowly shifted northward — because of continental drift — from 55 to about 34 million years ago, more seasonal plants appeared, creating forests.
  — Washington Post, 4 Dec. 2020
• Eons in advance, then, cartographers and earth scientists are clocking continental drift and fantasizing about new worlds.
  — Virginia Heffernan, Wired, 26 Oct. 2021
• This statistical approach can’t isolate a cause, but the team points out plenty of possibilities: continental drift, intense volcanism, climate change and sea level rise.
  — Eric Betz, Discover Magazine, 20 Sep. 2017
• Many cities are positioned on coasts, because of the historical ability to ship goods and transport people; many coasts also have small islands that are remnants of continental drift and tectonic activity over millions of years.
  — Caroline Delbert, Popular Mechanics, 15 Feb. 2023
• Natural selection depends on unpredictable mutations, and once a species emerges, its fate can be influenced by all sorts of forces, from viral outbreaks to continental drift, volcanic eruptions and asteroid impacts.
  — Quanta Magazine, 17 July 2014
• In highly simplified terms, continental drift occurs because only a relatively small proportion of the Earth’s substance is solid matter.
  — Jack Feerick, Discover Magazine, 25 Oct. 2020
• Wegener was the meteorologist who proposed the idea of continental drift, an idea resoundingly rejected at the time by geologists.
  — Jeffrey Wilkerson, Discover Magazine, 22 Jan. 2016
• This discovery helped transform the controversial notion of continental drift into the far more powerful and explanatory theory of plate tectonics.
  — The Economist, 10 Mar. 2018
• The revolutionary theory of continental drift advanced by Alfred Wegener in 1912, was rejected by mainstream geologists for four decades and only became popular after the mechanism of plate tectonics was recognized.
  — Avi Loeb, Scientific American, 3 June 2021

Last Updated: 24 Jul 2024