• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

How Do Supercontinents Form And Break Up?

May 15, 2024 by Deborah Bloomfield

The surface of the Earth is not static. Throughout its history, landmasses have come and gone, their parts drifting and shifting into one configuration or another. Sometimes land has been well-distributed, but at others it has all come together to form vast conglomerations called supercontinents, which themselves eventually break up. But what causes these enormous landmasses to form and shift?

Supercontinents are born

Supercontinents occur when most or all of Earth’s land is assembled into one large structure. This has occurred at least a few times throughout history, but the most recent example that incorporated all of Earth’s most significant landmasses was Pangea. By “recent”, however, we’re still talking about 320 to 195 million years ago, but that’s nothing in the lifetime of the Earth.

Advertisement

Pangea was essentially the only continent on the planet at the time and was surrounded by a single ocean – Panthalassa.

Before Pangea emerged, there were others too. They include Rodinia (assembled around 1.2 billion years ago to around 750 million years ago) and Columbia (sometimes known as Nuna, which existed from around 1.7 billion years ago to 1.45 billion years ago in the Precambrian period). There was also Gondwana, a large landmass that formed around 600 million years ago, but scientists are unsure whether it can really be classed as a supercontinent.

And supercontinents die

But as enormous and titanic as these landmasses are, they are no match for the planet’s turbulent interior motions over millions of years. All supercontinents eventually disappear, and Pangea was no different. The process that causes this change is known as continental drift and relates to the ceaseless movement of the planet’s tectonic plates. In fact, it was the effort to explain Pangea’s formation and subsequent fracturing that led to the theory of plate tectonics in the first place.

The idea was suggested in the early 20th century by the German meteorologist, Alfred Wegener, and was eventually proven true in the 1960s when new technology could demonstrate it.

Advertisement

The theory of plate tectonics basically posits that Earth’s outer layer, its crust (or lithosphere) is made up of multiple plates that move over the planet’s mantle (which makes up around 84 percent of the Earth’s volume and is sandwiched between the planet’s core and the crust). The heat from the radioactive processes within the planet’s interior cause the tectonic plates to move. Sometimes this movement brings landmasses together – to form supercontinents – and other times it moves them away, therefore destroying them.

In its destruction, Pangea broke into the pieces that we would recognize as the seven (or eight) continents that make up the world today. This is why the east cost of South America looks like it would fit against the west coast of Africa, like a jigsaw piece. Once upon a time, the two landmasses were one and the same.

The Earth’s land masses are still moving today. On average, they move about 1.5 centimeters (0.6 inches) a year, which is as fast as our toenails grow. Yet this is not a uniform rate. Regions like costal California move quicker than average – around 5 centimeters (2 inches) a year.

When the edges of tectonic plates meet, their motion can cause the crustal rocks to impact and grind against one another, which can result in earthquakes or volcanic eruptions. This activity can give birth to new mountains too.

Advertisement

ⓘ IFLScience is not responsible for content shared from external sites.

Given that continental drift is a continual process, our current continent configuration will not last. Already we are seeing signs of movements that will eventually lead to completely different layouts. This includes evidence that Africa is slowly being torn in two. One day, in millions and millions of years’ time, the continents will move back towards one another to form a new supercontinent that will be surrounded by a single massive ocean, much as it was when Pangea existed. There are even simulations that try to predict what this landmass will look like.

Of course, none of this will be relevant to any of us today. We will all be long dead, but it does show just how vibrant and changing our world is; it doesn’t need us to go on.

Advertisement

All “explainer” articles are confirmed by fact checkers to be correct at time of publishing. Text, images, and links may be edited, removed, or added to at a later date to keep information current. 

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. China says private tutors will not be able to offer classes online
  2. Novartis buys gene therapy company Arctos Medical
  3. Mount Everest Makes Some Horrifying Sounds At Night
  4. Adorable Jumping Spiders May Be Able To Recognize And Remember Each Other

Source Link: How Do Supercontinents Form And Break Up?

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • Unethical Experiments: When Scientists Really Should Have Stopped What They Were Doing Immediately
  • The First Humans Were Hunted By Leopards And Weren’t The Apex Predators We Thought They Were
  • Earth’s Passage Through The Galaxy Might Be Written In Its Rocks
  • What Is An Einstein Cross – And Why Is The Latest One Such A Unique Find?
  • If We Found Life On Mars, What Would That Mean For The Fermi Paradox And The Great Filter?
  • The Longest Living Mammals Are Giants That Live Up To 200 Years In The Icy Arctic
  • Entirely New Virus Detected In Bat Urine, And It’s Only The 4th Of Its Kind Ever Isolated
  • The First Ever Full Asteroid History: From Its Doomed Discovery To Collecting Its Meteorites
  • World’s Oldest Pachycephalosaur Fossil Pushes Back These Dinosaurs’ Emergence By 15 Million Years
  • The Hole In The Ozone Layer Is Healing And On Track For Full Recovery In The 21st Century, Thanks To Science
  • First Sweet Potato Genome Reveals They’re Hybrids With A Puzzling Past And 6 Sets Of Chromosomes
  • Why Is The Top Of Canada So Sparsely Populated? Meet The “Canadian Shield”
  • Humans Are In The Middle Of “A Great Evolutionary Transition”, New Paper Claims
  • Why Do Some Toilets Have Two Flush Buttons?
  • 130-Year-Old Butter Additive Discovered In Danish Basement Contains Bacteria From The 1890s
  • Prehistoric Humans Made Necklaces From Marine Mollusk Fossils 20,000 Years Ago
  • Zond 5: In 1968 Two Soviet Steppe Tortoises Beat Humans To Orbiting Around The Moon
  • Why Cats Adapted This Defense Mechanism From Snakes
  • Mother Orca Seen Carrying Dead Calf Once Again On Washington Coast
  • A Busy Spider Season Is Brewing: Why This Fall Could See A Boom Of Arachnid Activity
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version