📸 PANGEA FROM SPACE
PANGEA: THE PREHISTORC SUPERCONTINENT
Driven by heat from the core, convection currents churn the solid silicates of the mantle, pushing and pulling the thin plates of crust, bringing continents together and tearing them apart in cycles which can last for hundreds of millions of years. This shifting can also bring several continents into close enough proximity to form a single landmass above sea level. These clusters are known as supercontinents; the most famous of which is Pangea.
📸 PANGEA, MARKED BY MODERN BORDERS
Pangea formed roughly 335,000,000 years ago and existed as a single landmass for approximately 160,000,000 years. The breakup came after a series of powerful rifting events in which strong pulses of magma forced continental plates apart at the seams, creating new crust and opening up the basin in which the Atlantic Ocean eventually took shape.
Known as the Central Atlantic Magmatic Province (CAMP), the extant remnants of these flood basalts can be found in former rifts located in modern-day Morocco, Southwestern Europe, the Amazon River Basin, and Eastern North America.
📸 WEGENER'S PANGEA MODEL
DISCOVERING THE SUPERCONTINENT
As with other major geological events, CAMP was not simply a gentle shifting of landmass. The upheaval correlates with another massive extinction event in the fossil record: the Triassic–Jurassic extinction event. Nearly half of all species on Earth became extinct during this event, and it is considered the final clearing point which allowed the dinosaurs to cement their dominance for the next 135,000,000 years.
The hard surface of our planet, the lithosphere, is broken into plates which wander over time. Just over one hundred years ago, in 1912, Alfred Wegener proposed that all the continents once formed a single supercontinent he named Pangea. The basic concepts underlying his continental drift theory were eventually accepted and incorporated into plate tectonics in the 1960s.
However, Pangea is only the most recent supercontinent. Before Pangea there were two supercontinents: Laurasia in the north (North America, Greenland, Europe, and northern Asia) and Gondwana in the south (South America, Africa, Antarctica, Australia and India).
Gondwana: When the Earth Was One
Pangaea: the Prehistoric Supercontinent
The Tethys Ocean: A Lost Prehistoric Sea
Further Reading
Marzoli, Andrea, Paul R. Renne, Enzo M. Piccirillo, Marcia Ernesto, Giuliano Bellieni and Angelo De Min. "Extensive 200-Million-Year-Old Continental Flood Basalts of the Central Atlantic Magmatic Province." Science 284 (1999): 616-618. Researchgate.net. Web. 12 March 2018.
Rogers, John J.W. and M. Santosh. Continents and Supercontinents. Oxford University Press, 2004. EBSCOhost.com. Web. 12 March 2018.
Solomon, S. C., and Solid Earth Science Working Group. "Living on a restless planet." Solid Earth Science Working Group Report. Available from http://solidearth.jpl.nasa.gov/PDF/SESWG_final_combined.pdf (2002).
Torsvik, Trond H. and L. Robin M. Cocks. "From Wegener until now: the development of our understanding of Earth's Phanerozoic evolution." GEOLOGICA BELGICA 15.3 (2012): 181-192. EBSCOhost.com Web. 12 March 2018.