This paper discusses the hypothesis of the expanding Earth in the period ca. 1950-1975 and how it interacted with Paul Dirac’s cosmological hypothesis of a decreasing gravitational constant. It pays particular attention to the models in which the expansion of the Earth was thought to be caused by a varying gravitational constant. These models, primarily due to Pascual Jordan, László Egyed and Robert Dicke, were for a decade or so considered interesting alternatives to continental drift.

In the late 19th century, a regional geologic map of northwest South America was published by German botanist and geologist Hermann Karsten (1817–1908). Karsten’s work was incorporated by Agustín Codazzi (1793–1859) in his popular "Atlas geográfico e histórico de la Republica de Colombia" (1889). Geologic mapping and most interpretations provided in this 1889 atlas, however, were from Karsten's "Géologie de l'ancienne Colombie bolivarienne: Vénézuela, Nouvelle-Grenade et Ecuador" (1886).