09 February 2012

You'll need this map if you plan to time travel


At least if you're going forward in time.  It depicts the relative positions of the continents 100 million years from now, when they are expected to fuse into one supercontinent tentatively named [presumably by Americans and Asians] Amasia.  As reported in the ScienceNow column at Science:
Over the next few hundred million years, Mitchell says, the motions of tectonic plates will cause the Arctic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea to disappear, the western edge of South America to crowd up against the eastern seaboard, and Australia to slam into southeastern Asia. It's unclear whether Antarctica will join the party or be stranded at the South Pole.
I didn't know there was a supercontinent before Pangaea:
The geological record reveals that in the past 2 billion years or so, there have been three supercontinents, says Ross Mitchell, a geophysicist at Yale University. The oldest known supercontinent, Nuna, came together about 1.8 billion years ago. The next, Rodinia, existed about 1 billion years ago, and the most recent, Pangaea, came together about 300 million years ago. In the lengthy intervals between supercontinents, continent-sized-and-smaller landmasses drifted individually via plate tectonics, as they do today.
You learn something every day.

3 comments:

  1. i believe it's kind of biased not to mention gondwana...

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Gondwana was part of Pangaea (as was Laurasia). Supercontinents have to contain most of the existing landmass. When Pangaea broke apart, neither ....subsupercontinent?... met that requirement.

      Delete
  2. This is very handy. I intend to travel forward in time at a rate of at least one second per second for as long as possible.

    ReplyDelete

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