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Intro-planet: Earth's new continents
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Yousuf Khan
Feb 9, 2012, 6:49:42 PM2/9/12
to
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/02/09/new_supercontinent_100_million_years_away/
"It’s going to be a heck of a reunion: the Pangea supercontinent that
broke up to create the atlas we know today will one day reform in the
Northern hemisphere.
That’s the conclusion reached by researchers at Yale University who,
instead of looking at the past history of continental movements, have
turned their attention to the future.
It’s a difficult prediction to test, however: their estimate of the time
it’s going to take for today’s continents to collide with each other and
form what they call “Amasia” is around a hundred million years (with a
pretty big error bar – somewhere between 50 million and 200 million).
Their work, published in Nature, proposes a process called orthoversion,
in which new supercontinents form 90 degrees from the geographic centre
of their ancient predecessors. If they’re correct, the Arctic Ocean and
Caribbean Sea of today’s Earth will disappear, pushed aside as North and
South America migrate northwards, fuse, and collide with Europe and Asia.
Alaska and the Asian end of Russia will get friendly again – goodbye to
the Bering Strait. Australia and India, separated a long time in the
past, will tuck up underneath today’s Asian continent, with Africa
likely to turn the Mediterranean into a narrows rather than a sea.
The researchers, led by Yale doctoral student Ross Mitchell, places the
Americas and Eurasia more-or-less at the North Pole when the new
supercontinent forms.
The new theory contradicts current models of supercontinent formation,
which suggests that new supercontinents form either at 0 or 180 degrees
to their predecessors (referred to as introversion or extroversion).
These theories suggest the new supercontinent would form either by
today’s continents squeezing out the Atlantic Ocean or the Pacific.
Their prediction is based on the magnetism of ancient rocks, which
suggests supercontinents underwent “a series of back-and-forth rotations
around a stable axis along the equator”. These axes were offset not by
the 0 or 180 degrees proposed in prior theories, but by 90 degrees.
Mitchell’s orthoversion model suggests that the new supercontinent will
be centred around either Asia or North America, in a spot now occupied
by the Arctic Ocean, and stitched together by a new mountain range. "
"It’s going to be a heck of a reunion: the Pangea supercontinent that
broke up to create the atlas we know today will one day reform in the
Northern hemisphere.
That’s the conclusion reached by researchers at Yale University who,
instead of looking at the past history of continental movements, have
turned their attention to the future.
It’s a difficult prediction to test, however: their estimate of the time
it’s going to take for today’s continents to collide with each other and
form what they call “Amasia” is around a hundred million years (with a
pretty big error bar – somewhere between 50 million and 200 million).
Their work, published in Nature, proposes a process called orthoversion,
in which new supercontinents form 90 degrees from the geographic centre
of their ancient predecessors. If they’re correct, the Arctic Ocean and
Caribbean Sea of today’s Earth will disappear, pushed aside as North and
South America migrate northwards, fuse, and collide with Europe and Asia.
Alaska and the Asian end of Russia will get friendly again – goodbye to
the Bering Strait. Australia and India, separated a long time in the
past, will tuck up underneath today’s Asian continent, with Africa
likely to turn the Mediterranean into a narrows rather than a sea.
The researchers, led by Yale doctoral student Ross Mitchell, places the
Americas and Eurasia more-or-less at the North Pole when the new
supercontinent forms.
The new theory contradicts current models of supercontinent formation,
which suggests that new supercontinents form either at 0 or 180 degrees
to their predecessors (referred to as introversion or extroversion).
These theories suggest the new supercontinent would form either by
today’s continents squeezing out the Atlantic Ocean or the Pacific.
Their prediction is based on the magnetism of ancient rocks, which
suggests supercontinents underwent “a series of back-and-forth rotations
around a stable axis along the equator”. These axes were offset not by
the 0 or 180 degrees proposed in prior theories, but by 90 degrees.
Mitchell’s orthoversion model suggests that the new supercontinent will
be centred around either Asia or North America, in a spot now occupied
by the Arctic Ocean, and stitched together by a new mountain range. "
Tom McDonald
Feb 9, 2012, 9:06:37 PM2/9/12
to
link:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/08/supercontinent-will-form-over-arctic-yale-scientists-say_n_1263350.html?ref=science
Or:
http://tinyurl.com/7lrshua
This goes several hundred million years into the future. It's
interesting, but, of course, it's sort of an 'artist's conception' of
the theory.
Tom McDonald
Feb 9, 2012, 9:08:24 PM2/9/12
to
YKhan
Feb 11, 2012, 6:26:42 PM2/11/12
to
On Feb 9, 9:06 pm, Tom McDonald <tmcdonald2...@charter.net> wrote:
> On 2/9/2012 5:49 PM, Yousuf Khan wrote:
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> >http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/02/09/new_supercontinent_100_millio...
> On 2/9/2012 5:49 PM, Yousuf Khan wrote:
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Cool, seems to go beyond the 100mn year limit and show how even that
supercontinent is going to break up.
In a sense you can say we have a supercontinent right now. Europe and
Asia are of course the same landmass, not even sure why they bother to
separate out Europe from Asia. India is already considered part of
Asia. But even beyond that, you can say that North America already
connects to Asia through the Bering Strait, even though that's
underwater now, it's really a shallow sea. Greenland shares a
continental shelf with North America too. South America is already
attached to North America and it's just getting cozier day by day.
Africa is crashing into Europe, and if it weren't for the shallow
Mediterranean Sea, we wouldn't even know it was a separate continent.
Australia also shares a continental shelf with Asia. The only oddball
is Antarctica, which is not yet connected to anybody else's
continental shelf: so one supercontinent, and Antarctica.
Yousuf Khan
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