Question: How far has each Continent moved over the millions of years?

Sheona Masterton answered on 16 Nov 2015:

It depends on how far back in time you go. India’s probably the one that’s travelled the furthest in recent times (as in over the last 130 million years or so…geologists have a weird idea of what is a short time!). It used to be part of a massive continent called Gondwana, which started ripping apart about 130 million years ago. When that happened, India began moving north, much faster than any of the other continents- it travelled something like 7000 km north before smashing into Asia and forming the Himalayas.

Some continents, like the main part of Europe (which we call Baltica) just kind of jiggled around at roughly the same latitude for hundreds of millions of years. In some cases, the edges of continents have been ripped off and moved quite far to smash into completely different continents. England and Wales are a good example of that…we used to be stuck onto the edge of Gondwana over 500 million years ago, but sometime around 480 million years ago, we broke away from it and eventually smashed into the edge of Europe!