Dpanacengmaoeav, ing Continents

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Today, we look at the familiar map and see the seemingly stable shapes of the land, but we are just catching a moment in a much more complex dance.

Two hundred million years ago, the continents were together in the most recent supercontinent, known to paleogeologists as Pangaea. The continents of today are now coming apart from that configuration. On a spherical planet, however, the continents will inevitably, eventually come together in a completely new configuration.

Combining geological and biological evidence, it is possible to piece back together some details of Pangaea’s shape and division, and the corresponding effects on the distribution of plants and animals we see today. As new scientific techniques uncover more evidence, we can look deeper into the past and discover the shape of the supercontinents that preceded Pangaea, and use that to predict the supercontinents of the future.

Migrating Continents

The first place to start is with a map. The shapes of South America and Africa mirror each other, but only in the 20th century was an explanation proposed to

Combining geological and biological evidence, it is possible to piece back some details of Pangaea’s shape and division

Americas from Eurasia and Africa. On the back side of these continents, the vast mountain ranges of the Americas’ west and the East Asian volcanos were being triggered by the continents pushing into and over the rocks of the Pacific seafloor.

As ocean floor is being uplifted and created in the mid-atlantic, it is being driven down and destroyed at the leading edges of the continents. This led to the theory of tectonic plates, where large sections of the Earth’s crust are moving around slowly. There is an interlocked network of mid-oceanic ridges around the planet and their expansion drives the movement of the tectonic plates.

Pangaea, from the Greek word for “all earth” was a supercontinent with a cold interior and a vast ocean, Panthalassa, on its perimeter