Exhibit: Pangaea Puzzle

Arrange the plates to match some period of time in the past or present before watching the continents drift.  The exhibit’s plates float on compressed air to simulate the Earth’s shifting crust and how they move on the soft mantle below.  The exhibit gives you an idea of what has happened to the earth’s continents over the past 200 million years.  The exhibit’s continents drift apart on a layer of air in a similar way to how the Earth’s continents have ‘floated’ slowly apart on the semi-molten rock underneath the it’s crust.  A super-continent in the geological past was suspected by early map-makers 400 years ago – the shape of the South American and the African coastlines on opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean look as if they could have once fitted together.