Continental drift is still happening, and the continents will continue to move in the future. They are unlikely to return to the shape of Pangaea, but a map of the world 150 million years from now could look significantly different from today’s.
Many times in Earth’s past the continents have been dispersed across the globe, kept apart by spreading oceans. But eventually oceans begin to close, and far-flung lands are drawn inexorably together. They fuse in crunching collisions, welding themselves into single vast terrains: supercontinents.
Continents are short-lived unions. Stirred by hot currents below, these great continental collages are destined to break up and once again go their separate ways. It’s the planet’s version of a family Christmas. Except rather than return every year, Earth’s Continent boom-and-bust cycles last 500 million years. Lost worlds litter our planet’s past – the ancestral supercontinents of Ur, Kenorland, Nuna, Rhodinia, and Pannotia.
Earth’s most recent grand union was 250 million years ago, when a continental mashup brought Pangea together. The giant landmass survived a mere 50 million years. It was undone by splits that tugged its American margins free from its African centre, broke apart the antipodean lands and then cleaved an Atlantic rift northward to release the conjoined bulk of Europe and Asia.
Neighbouring landmasses set off on different trajectories. India, originally snug with Madagascar, sped northwards to plough into Asia, thrusting ancient seafloor up into Himalayan peaks. The divorce of Australia and Antarctica left one to drift off into drier desert latitudes while the other languished in polar isolation. As these vast crustal rafts drifted across the globe, so landscapes and life adjusted. Each continent has been fashioned by that escape from Pangea.
But the continents are starting to come together again. North Africa is advancing into Mediterranean Europe, and over the next few tens of millions of years its shores will crumple into a chain of snowy peaks. Australia – the fastest-moving continent – is already beginning to sweep up New Guinea and the Indonesian archipelago en route to a messy pile-up with Asia. Pangea is slowly reassembling. Give the planet a couple of hundred millions years and we’ll have another supercontinent. Geologists even have a name for it: Pangea Ultima.
Picture Credit : Google