Nothing is permanent on the surface of our planet: no landscape with which we are familiar will remain in its current state forever and, in general, the rocks that surround us are usually a few tens or a few hundred million years old. . In the end, it will only be a matter of time before the most beautiful beach you have ever visited disappears or the most extensive plain you have ever seen ends up turned into a mountain range.
The person responsible for these radical changes is the movement of the tectonic plates, the force that changes the distribution of the masses of land and water on the surface of our planet. Every piece of the earth’s crust moves over time. New lands emerge, others are buried under the ocean or, even more, are reburied under the crust when they collide with another more massive tectonic plate.
Luckily for us, this movement is extremely slow and the coastal cities do not have to worry about the people across the sea going to collide with them. The continents move at between 2 and 10 centimeters per year, more or less, which is not very different from the speed at which our hair grows (about 15 centimeters per year). As a result, as Ted Nield says in his book “Supercontinent”, ” all those lost lands only truly exist in […] the human mind, the only eye that can see through time .”
And supercontinents are precisely the matter because it turns out that the tectonic plates follow a cyclical pattern: every few hundred million years the continents end up uniting and forming a gigantic continent … which then divides again.
Surely the best known super continent is Pangea . It is also the most recent, since it existed between 300 and 200 million years ago (Ma). But the continents that shaped Pangea in turn proceeded from the division of another supercontinent called Panottia, which stood out from the blue ocean 600 million years ago. But even further back in time there were the supercontinents of Rodinia (1,100-750 Ma), Columbia (1,800-1,500 Ma) and Kenorland (2,700 Ma). It is believed that if we could travel to the most remote past of our planet, we would encounter the supercontinents of Ur (3,000 Ma) and Vaalbara (3,600 Ma).
Unfortunately, the older a supercontinent is, the more difficult it is to predict its shape. This is because uncertainty increases the further we go back in the past. This is not only because the internal dynamics of the planet can change slightly over time, producing results that we do not expect, but also because we also have very little data on the appearance of the continents at that time, precisely because the oldest parts of the planet’s surface disappeared a long, long time ago … Due to the effect of plate tectonics.
