About 200 million years ago, the supercontinent (landmasses made up of multiple continents) of Pangea split and created the continents we have today on Earth that are separated by vast oceans. Is this setting immutable? These powerful landmasses won’t stay here forever, as it looks like another supercontinent could grace our planet in the future, roughly 200 million years from now.
The continents sit on tectonic plates, those slabs of crust that float on the Earth’s mantle. The mantle acts like a pot of boiling water: the molten core of the Earth heats the rock at the bottom of the mantle and it rises slowly. Meanwhile, the cooling slabs of crust sink in the subduction zones to the bottom of the mantle. This flow, called mantle convection, drives – over millions of years – the movements of continental plates and their eventual assembly into supercontinents.
Researchers theorize that supercontinents form in regular cycles, approximately once every 600 million years, so, driven by the progressive flow of rocks in the hot mantle of our planet, they predict that within about 200 million years they will it would form a new giant land mass, as in its time happened with Columbia or Pangea. The most recent supercontinent (in relative terms) was Pangea , which existed from about 300 million to 200 million years ago and included what is now Africa, Europe, North America, and South America. Before Pangea there was Rodinia, which existed from 900 million to 700 million years ago, and before that, Nuna , which formed 1.6 billion years ago and broke apart 1.4 billion years ago.
The future
In this panorama, there are two possible scenarios, since it is difficult to glimpse what this supercontinent would look like: that all the continents would advance towards the northern hemisphere (baptized as Amasia) , and Antarctica would be left alone in the southern hemisphere; or that a supercontinent forms around the equator and extends into the northern and southern hemispheres (dubbed Aurica ).
When Pangea broke 175 million years ago, it led to the formation of the Ring of Fire, a set of subduction zones along the perimeter of the Pacific Ocean that fuels volcanoes and earthquakes. Several continents have already combined to create today’s megacontinent, Eurasia, and it has run into the Ring of Fire, our era’s belt of subduction. As Eurasia moves laterally along the Ring of Fire, at some point it will collide with the Americas, forming a new supercontinent in the next 50-200 million years.
What consequences would it have for the planet?
In both models, the result was a drastic change in global climate: significantly colder temperatures, which could herald a deep freeze unlike any other in the Earth’s past, lasting at least 100 million years , scientists from Columbia University who tried to model the climate of this possible supercontinent of the future.
With this, in this possible scenario called Amasia, the entire planet will enter an Ice Age. The incredible biodiversity that supports areas such as the tropical lowlands will disappear, which would eventually disappear although it is likely that new species emerged and adapted to survive in an extremely cold environment, as it already happened in the past, in previous ice ages.
If the supercontinent Aurica were to form, the result would be quite different. The earth would absorb sunlight from this area, causing higher temperatures; an effect that would be amplified by the absence of polar caps, which reflect the heat of the Earth’s atmosphere.
Reference: Sciencemag
