A team of geologists from Yale University (USA) has proposed a new hypothesis about where the great continental blocks will move and what their distribution will be in millions of years. As described today in the magazineNature, Eurasia and America would merge into a future supercontinent, called Amasia, in a place near the North Pole. Furthermore, according to this hypothesisthe Arctic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea would cease to exist. And North and South America would be unified.
“There is still a long way to go before such an event occurs,” says Mitchell in statements to the SINC agency. Specifically, the expert estimates that the union of America with Eurasia would occur between 50 and 200 million years from now. According to Taylor M. Kilian, a researcher at the same university and co-author of the study, “this type of analysis offers us a way to organize the continents, both in latitude and longitude, and allow us to better understand the dynamics of the deep interior of the Earth.”
It is not the only theory that tries to predict the future of the Earth’s continents. According to aprevious model called introversionIn 50 million years, the Mediterranean Sea would disappear, Europe and Africa would collide, and Australia would join Indonesia. These movements, added to the displacement of Antarctica to the north and the disappearance of the Greenland ice, would cause a rise in sea level close to 90 meters, with the consequent floods and changes in the climate. If these events occurred, 200 million years later Africa would move until it collided with North America and would envelop South America, making the Pacific Ocean the largest by occupying half the planet. The theory called? Pangea Ultima? to the supercontinent that would form after these changes.
The other alternative isextroversion, a model opposite to the previous one. In this hypothesis, the entire American continent would move through the Pacific Ocean and would rotate until it enveloped Siberia and joined Asia, resulting in Amasia. In turn, Antarctica would migrate northwards while East Africa, separated from the rest of the continent, and Madagascar would move along the Indian Ocean until merging with Asia. This theory predicts that the waters of the Pacific will close completely within 350 million years.
