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Two plates sliding past one another are known as transforming plates.  This boundary is known as a transform boundary.  These types of boundaries often cause earthquakes and other types of geologic distress.

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Convergent Boundaries are formed when two or more plates are moving together.  Two or more plates moving together are called converging plates.  This type of boundary causes the subduction of plates and the formation of mountain ranges.

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The continents formed a single landmass called pangaea and ended up drifting apart to their present locations.

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Alfred Wegener (born November 1, 1880, Berlin, Germany-died November 1930, Greenland) German meteorologist and geophysicist who formulated the first complete statement of the continental drift hypothesis.

The son of an orphanage director, Wegener earned a Ph.D. degree in astronomy from the University of Berlin in 1905. He had meanwhile become interested in paleoclimatology, and in 1906-08 he took part in an expedition to Greenland to study polar air circulation. On this trip he befriended German climatologist Wladimir Köppen, who became his mentor, and later married Köppen's daughter, Elsa, in 1913. He made three more expeditions to Greenland, in 1912-13, 1929, and 1930. He taught meteorology at Marburg and Hamburg and was a professor of meteorology and geophysics at the University of Graz from 1924 to 1930. He died during his last expedition to Greenland in 1930.

Like certain other scientists before him, Wegener became impressed with the similarity in the coastlines of eastern South America and western Africa and speculated that those lands had once been joined together. About 1910 he began toying with the idea that in the late Paleozoic Era (which ended about 252 million years ago) all the present-day continents had formed a single large mass, or supercontinent, which had subsequently broken apart. Wegener called this ancient continent Pangaea. Other scientists had proposed such a continent but had explained the separation of the modern world's continents as having resulted from the subsidence, or sinking, of large portions of the supercontinent to form the Atlantic and Indian oceans. Wegener, by contrast, proposed that Pangaea's constituent portions had slowly moved thousands of miles apart over long periods of geologic time. His term for this movement was die Verschiebung der Kontinente ("continental displacement"), which gave rise to the term continental drift.

Wegener first presented his theory in lectures in 1912 and published it in full in 1915 in his most important work, Die Entstehung der Kontinente und Ozeane ( The Origin of Continents and Oceans). He searched the scientific literature for geological and paleontological evidence that would buttress his theory, and he was able to point to many closely related fossil organisms and similar rock strata that occurred on widely separated continents, particularly those found in both the Americas and in Africa. Wegener's theory of continental drift won some adherents in the ensuing decade, but his postulations of the driving forces behind the continents' movement seemed implausible. By 1930 his theory had been rejected by most geologists, and it sank into obscurity for the next few decades, only to be resurrected as part of the theory of plate tectonics during the 1960s.

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Alfred Wegener | Biography, Theory, & Facts

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Alfred Wegener, German meteorologist and geophysicist who formulated the first complete statement of the continental drift hypothesis. His theory was rejected by most geologists during his lifetime but was resurrected and made a central feature of modern geology as part of the theory of plate tectonics in the 1960s.

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Tectonic plates are always moving.  This motion is extremely slow, about as fast as your fingernails grow.  This slow motion over millions of years moves continents many miles apart, and still continues to do so.  This Motion is caused by convection currents in the athenosphere. There are three main types of tectonic plate boundaries; divergent, convergent and transform.  Divergent basically means that the plates move apart.  Convergent basically means that the plates move together.  Transform basically means that the plates move alongside one another.  All these motions result in different geologic occurrences.

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Tectonic Plates move because of convection currents in the asthenosphere.  Tectonic plates float on top of the asthenosphere, and therefore shift about as it flows.  This motion is extremely slow, moving only a few centimeters each year.    Source

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Two tectonic plates moving apart are known as diverging plates.  Two or more plates moving apart form a divergent boundary. This creates new seafloor and causes ocean ridges and rift valleys.

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Continental Drift is the theory that all Earth's tectonic plates have moved or "drifted" over time.