Wegener was, by training, an Arctic climate scientist. He suspected that if he plotted a location map of the late Paleozoic glacial striations and till, he might gain an understanding into the locations of continents during the Paleozoic era.
He found that glaciers of the Paleozoic era occurred in southern Africa, South America, Antarctica, southern India, and southern Australia when he plotted these locations. These locations are now widely separated and are not located in cold polar regions, except for Antarctica.
Wegener observed that all late Paleozoic glaciated areas lay adjacent to each other on his Pangaea map. When he further plotted the glacial striations orientation, he observed that they all pointed roughly outward from a location in southeastern Africa.
This led Wegener to believe that the distribution of glaciations at the end of the Paleozoic Era be easily explained if the continents had been united in Pangaea, with the southern part of Pangaea lying beneath the center of a huge ice cap. He believed that this type of glaciation distribution could not be explained if the continents had always been in their present positions.
