Timothy Burbery #fundie nautil.us
Another thing, and this is brand new, Dante may have anticipated the theory of continental drift or continental movement. Dante does mention that when Satan hits the Earth, he hits the Southern Hemisphere, tunnels into the center of the Earth, and it kicks up all the dirt and so on. And the continents actually move away from him. In Dante’s time, he didn’t know about Australia or South America. He thought all the continents were in the Northern Hemisphere. But is there a little bit of a sense of Pangea, the notion at all that the continents might be moving? When Alfred Wegener proposed this about a century ago, people laughed. But Dante actually wrote an essay titled, A Question of the Water and the Land, which attempts to investigate why dry land rises above sea level.