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In case you're given to worrying about situations at least 200 million years in the future ...
Geologists seem confident our current continents will move so as to once again coalesce into a single supercontinent - so confident they've already named it (Amasia / Pangea Proxima).
FULL STORY: https://www.livescience.com/63753-will-there-be-another-pangea.html
Geologists seem confident our current continents will move so as to once again coalesce into a single supercontinent - so confident they've already named it (Amasia / Pangea Proxima).
Will There Ever Be Another Pangea?
Just before the dawn of the dinosaurs — roughly 251 million years ago — Earth's continents abutted one another, merging to form the supercontinent Pangea. That land mass, which straddled the equator like an ancient Pac-Man, eventually split into Gondwana in the south and Laurasia in the north.
From there, Gondwana and Laurasia separated into the seven continents that we know today. But the constant movement of Earth's tectonic plates raises a question: Will there ever be another supercontinent like Pangea?
The answer is yes. Pangea wasn't the first supercontinent to form during Earth's 4.5-billion-year geologic history, and it won't be the last. ...
"That's the one part of the debate that there isn't much debate over," Ross Mitchell, a geologist at Curtin University in Perth, Australia, told Live Science. "But what 'the next Pangea' will look like … that's where opinions diverge."
Geologists agree that there is a well-established, fairly regular cycle of supercontinent formation. It's happened three times in the past. The first one was Nuna (also called Columbia), which existed from about 1.8 billion to 1.3 billion years ago. Next came Rodinia, which dominated the planet between 1.2 billion and 750 million years ago. So, there's no reason to think that another supercontinent won't form in the future, Mitchell said.
According to Mitchell, a new supercontinent forms every 600 million years or so, but that cycle might be speeding up. This suggests that the next Pangea, dubbed Amasia (or Pangea Proxima) would form sooner than we expect. Mitchell thinks the cycle is speeding up because the Earth’s internal heat — hoarded in the planet's core since the time of its formation — is dissipating, meaning that convection is happening faster.
"Given that the heyday of Pangea was probably 300 million years ago, Amasia's would be 300 million years from now," Mitchell said. "But it could form as soon as 200 million years from now." ...
It's unclear what's in store for life on Earth when the next supercontinent forms. But, thanks to scientists like Mitchell and Green, we may at least know what our atlases should look like a few hundred million years from now.
FULL STORY: https://www.livescience.com/63753-will-there-be-another-pangea.html