How Long Would It Take for the Pangea to Form Again

The Earth's continents are in abiding motion. On at least 3 occasions, they take all collided to form ane behemothic continent. If history is a guide, the current continents will coagulate once again to form another supercontinent. And a report in Nature at present shows how that could come about.

You tin think of continents as giant puzzle pieces shuffling around the Globe. When they drift apart, mighty oceans form. When they come up together, oceans disappear. And it'south all because continents sit down on moving plates of the Earth's crust.

A new model of continental migrate predicts that the next supercontinent could form near the North Pole — in another 100 million years or so.

Two of the previous supercontinents, which formed 200 million years ago (Pangaea) and 800 1000000 years agone (Rodinia). Mitchell, et. al./Nature hibernate caption

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Mitchell, et. al./Nature

Ii of the previous supercontinents, which formed 200 million years ago (Pangaea) and 800 meg years ago (Rodinia).

Mitchell, et. al./Nature

The Americas and Asia may fuse together to form a new supercontinent, "Amasia." Mitchell, et. al./Nature hide explanation

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Mitchell, et. al./Nature

The Americas and Asia may fuse together to form a new supercontinent, "Amasia."

Mitchell, et. al./Nature

"Continents on these plates typically movement, I would say, at the rate your fingernails abound," says Ross Mitchell, a graduate pupil at Yale University. That may seem dull, merely it adds up over hundreds of millions of years.

Look at an atlas and you can imagine how Africa and South America, for example, in one case nestled together.

"Rewind the record and bring all the continents back into their jigsaw arrangement, yous have this vast landmass of all the Earth's continental blocks together," Mitchell says.

Last fourth dimension all the landmass clumped up, it formed a supercontinent called Pangaea. The dinosaurs walked in that location. But Pangaea wasn't the first.

"There had been three, possibly a debated quaternary supercontinent through the billions of years," Mitchell says.

He has been studying that deep history by looking at tiny magnets buried in stone around the world. Those magnets pointed north when they were locked into the stone. Sample those magnets in layers of rock laid downward over millions of years, and you tin tell the story of how those continents have moved.

And naturally, that led Mitchell to wonder what the next supercontinent will look like.

There take been two leading ideas. 1 is that the continents will collapse together once more at the site of the last supercontinent, centered on Africa. That would squeeze the Atlantic Bounding main close. The other idea is that the Atlantic would keep growing and growing.

Nether this scenario, "a supercontinent rifts apart, and the continents skirt effectually to the opposite side of the globe, re-creating the side by side supercontinent, 180 degrees on the opposite side of the world from the previous one," Mitchell says.

That would leave us with a supercontinent in place of the Pacific Bounding main.

A Supercontinent Chosen Amasia

But Mitchell's research for his Ph.D. thesis suggests both those ideas are incorrect. Instead, he says the continents seem to be moving north. That ways the Caribbean Bounding main and the Arctic Ocean volition exist squished shut.

"Think about closing the Caribbean Ocean — you accept now fused North and South America," Mitchell says. "And and then by fusing the Arctic Ocean, y'all would suture the Americas with Eurasia."

850 Million Years Of Globe-trotting

The land on Globe is moving, but slowly — nearly as fast as your fingernails grow. If nosotros plow the clock back 850 million years, we can see how the continents grew autonomously and dorsum together several times.

That would create a supercontinent called Amasia that would form at the pinnacle of the Earth. Eventually information technology would slump south toward the equator. And nether this scenario, Antarctica might remain isolated at the bottom of the world.

Brendan White potato studies supercontinents at St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia. He says the Yale team'southward thought is provocative, innovative and plausible.

"What they've washed is they've thrown some other possibility out there that, quite frankly, many of us hadn't really thought about. So fifty-fifty if the model is wrong, we will learn a lot by testing it."

And he says the challenge isn't simply finding different ways to put together the World'south jigsaw puzzle continents.

"This is actually important because it influences the evolution of our entire planet, including life that lives on it," Tater says. "For example, many people believe that supercontinents form and stood autonomously their fundamental changes in climate."

Of course, the next supercontinent isn't probable to course for another 100 1000000 years or and then. And Mitchell says the human species will probably be long gone by then, so we won't know, "merely it's certainly fun to recall nigh."

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Source: https://www.npr.org/2012/02/08/146572456/amasia-the-next-supercontinent

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