GONDWANALAND

also called Gondwana, hypothetical former supercontinent in the Southern Hemisphere, which included South America, Africa, peninsular India, Australia, and Antarctica. The name was coined by the Austrian geologist Eduard Suess in reference to the Upper Paleozoic and Mesozoic formations of the Gondwana region of central India, which display typical developments of some of the shared geologic features. The geologic evidence for a former land connection between the currently separated continents and other areas includes the occurrence of tillites (glacial deposits) of Permo-Carboniferous age (the time boundary between the Carboniferous and Permian periods is 286 million years ago) and similar floras and faunas that are not found in the Northern Hemisphere. The widely distributed seed fern Glossopteris is particularly cited in this regard. The rock strata that contain this evidence are called the Karoo (Karroo) System in South Africa, the Gondwana System in India, and the Santa Catharina System in South America. The concept that the continents were at one time joined in the geologic past was first set forth in detail by Alfred Wegener, a German meteorologist, in 1912. He envisioned a single great landmass, Pangaea, which supposedly began to separate late in the Triassic Period (245 to 208 million years ago). Subsequent workers distinguished between a southern landmass, Gondwanaland, and Laurasia to the north. It should be noted that much of Wegener's hypothesis of continental drift was based on the apparent geographic "fit" of the bulge of eastern South America and the western coast of Africa. The geologic evidence cited earlier was provided by subsequent investigators. The idea of Gondwanaland languished for many years, except among scientists in countries of the Southern Hemisphere, until the 1960s, when evidence of sea-floor spreading from the loci of oceanic ridges proved that the ocean basins are not permanent global features and vindicated Wegener's hypothesis of continental drift. Although the term Gondwanaland does not appear in the modern literature with great frequency, the concept of continental drift and former continental connections is widely accepted.