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
  • The heat is from Earth’s molten interior, which causes continental drift.
    — Caroline Delbert, Popular Mechanics, 15 Mar. 2021
  • The benefits of boundaries Our first known is geography, which continental drift will in time alter, but not in our time.
    — Hal Brands, Foreign Affairs, 19 Oct. 2021
  • States will continue to shift their political allegiance at roughly the pace of continental drift.
    — Walter Shapiro, The New Republic, 28 Nov. 2022
  • When continental drift broke Pangaea apart, the ginkgo vanished from North America.
    — Clive Thompson, The Atlantic, 9 Oct. 2020
  • Eons in advance, then, cartographers and earth scientists are clocking continental drift and fantasizing about new worlds.
    — Virginia Heffernan, Wired, 26 Oct. 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • But the idea, called continental drift, remained highly debated into the 1960s, and no one had come up with a way to synthesize it all into a grand, testable framework.
    — Clay Risen, BostonGlobe.com, 12 Aug. 2023
  • And there’s a game where visitors piece back together Gondwana while exploring the concepts of evolution, tectonic plates and continental drift.
    — Liz Rothaus Bertrand, Charlotte Observer, 26 June 2024
  • As late as 1958, a book rejecting continental drift included a foreword by Albert Einstein.
    — Cody Cottier, Discover Magazine, 18 Feb. 2021
  • The far-reaching distribution of Glossopteris provided integral evidence to support the idea of continental drift.
    — Allison Futterman, Discover Magazine, 10 Nov. 2023
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • The scientific case for exploration dates back many millions of years to continental drift when Greenland was believed to be closely connected to Norway and the British Isles.
    — Jordan Blum, Fortune, 22 Oct. 2025
  • Minecraft can generate countless worlds by combining noise functions with parameters for temperature, humidity, erosion and continental drift.
    — Amir Husain, Forbes.com, 29 Jan. 2026
  • The expedition’s leader was another German scientist, Alfred Wegener, who’s best known for having come up with the theory of continental drift.
    — Elizabeth Kolbert, The New Yorker, 7 Oct. 2024
  • According to Kristofer Helgen, a biologist and chief scientist at the Australian Museum, the continent lays claim to so many deadly creatures partially because of continental drift.
    — Sara Novak, Discover Magazine, 25 Feb. 2022
  • Later, German scientist Alfred Wegener formed the theory of continental drift — which hypothesized that the continents separated and drifted to other locations.
    — Allison Futterman, Discover Magazine, 10 Nov. 2023
  • 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

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'continental drift.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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