Continental drift is the movement of the Earth's
continents relative to each other, thus appearing to "drift" across the ocean bed. The speculation that continents might have 'drifted' was first put forward by
Abraham Ortelius in 1596. The concept was independently and more fully developed by
Alfred Wegener in 1912, but his theory was rejected by some for lack of a mechanism (though this was supplied later by
Arthur Holmes) and others because of prior theoretical commitments. The idea of continental drift has been subsumed by the theory of
plate tectonics, which explains how the continents move.