Looking at the land masses and to some extent, the major rivers, they seem to be oriented vertically, not horizontally. For example, the Americas, Africa and Greenland. Madagascar, Sweden, Taiwan, Sri Lanka, Kamchatka. Some exceptions are Cuba and New Guinea. But with the spin going East-West, I would have guessed more E-W land masses and channels of water going E-W.
What could explain a tendency for N-S land masses? I considered “uneven heating by the sun”, but the the day is so short relative to geologic time.
*Not *that I agree with your premise (I think it’s confirmation bias), but if continental drift had an E-W bias because of spin, this would show as a N-S orientation of landforms.
Are you sure this is an actual phenomenon? Yes to the Americas and Greenland, but Asia is predominantly east-west, and even more so if you consider it Eurasia, and even more so if you consider Africa originally part of the same supercontinent… and then there’s Australia, and Antarctica, and SE Asia, and Japan, etc. As for rivers, there’s the Missouri, the Amazon, the Rio Grande, the Yangtze, the Huang/Yellow River, Ganges, etc.
On the other hand, Pangaea and maybe some of the other supercontinents did seem to be N-S oriented as well, so let’s see what the geography people say…
Perhaps you see the N-S orientation more readily because that is how maps are conventionally oriented. The Eurasian land-mass is oriented E-W. Australia is oriented E-W. The Carribean basin - the inverse of land-mass, if you will - is oriented E-W. The Indonesian archipelago is oriented E-W.
One of the reasons the continents look so long and skinny has nothing to with geography, but everything to do with geographers. The most common way of sticking a globe on a flat ppiece of paper is to use the Mercator Projection which exaggerates the N-S length of anything as it gets closer to the poles.
In the northeastern U.S., geographic features such as the Applalachian Mountains (including the Green Mountains and White Mountains in New England), and rivers such as the Hudson River, Housatonic River, and Connecticut River, are oriented north-south because the eastern edge of what would become the North American continent slammed into Africa when Pangaea was formed hundreds of millions of years ago, compressing the bedrock into north-south ridges. The Connecticut River valley is actually a rift valley from when Pangaea later broke apart. The super-continent started to separate at location of the Connecticut River, which if it had continued would have left much of New England attached to Africa. Instead, after stretching for a time, the actual break took place a couple of hundred miles east, off the coast of Massachusetts.
See this bedrock map of New England to see the north-south orientation of faults and bedrock formations.
Considering the planet as a whole, though, I think that geographic features could end up in any orientation, though in a given region they tend to line up because of continental plate collisions. I don’t think that heating by the Sun has much to do with anything.
BTW, the preferred term is plate techtonics these days, because it’s not that the continents per se are drifting, but that the various plates carrying them move around.
In fact, the east-west orientation of Eurasia vs. the north-south orientation of sub-Saharan Africa and the Americas is one of the points made by Jared Diamond in “Guns, Germs and Steel”, cited as contributory to European ascendency. Technology transfer, particularly of agriculture and animal husbandry techniques, is much easier for places that are climatically similar by virtue of being at the same general latitude.
It seems to me that the N/S orientation of continents is really just an expression of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. It’s only Africa-Europe and South-North America that show the strong N/S orientation, and those are the continents directly split by the Mid-Atlantic ridge.
I don’t think there’s any reason for the ridge to have a N/S orientation, but once you set that particular feature, everything else inevitably follows.
The Himalayas, the Alps, the Caucasus, and the Pyrenees all run E-W. The Amazon, the Danube, the Congo, the Yangtze run W-E (or E-W in the case of the Congo). Heck, the Potomac runs W-E.
