Super Continent

[Anomalocaris]

Really? The evolution of the earth is a super continent? That divided itself through plate tectonics? Really?

Please 'splain the impossible!

Yes all the land we see now was one giant continent. REALLY!

And it happened more than once.  Pangaea was just the most recent instance when vast majority of earth’s continental mass clearly assembled into a single enormous contigous land mass popularly called supercontinent.

Pangaea began assembly around 400 million years ago when Proto-North America closed the ancient lapetus ocean and slammed into proto-africa.  We can actually use paleomagnetic techniques to trace backwards the movements of the major parts that came together to assemble Pangaea, and map out their movements before Pangaea assembled.  We can use rock formations and evidence of ancient rifting and mountain building to verify which parts were connected to which other parts at what time.

As it turns out, vast majority of the parts that came together to assemble Pangaea had been all connected together before on several prior ccasions to assemble earlier supercontinents before Pangaea.  

About 600 million years ago, or 250 million years before Pangaea formed, all the major continent parts of the earth were assembled in another elongated contigous land mass roughly centered around the South Pole.  It is believed that the assembly of a supercontinent near the Pole allowed vast amounts of snow and ice to accumulate, increasing the total reflectivity of the earth and reducing the total solar energy earth absorbs.  So the assembly of this supercontinent at South Pole probably contributed to snowball earth which happened at the same time.  This supercontinent is called Pannotia.   For various reasons not yet satisfactorily explained, Pannotia was short lived, coming together and than separating in less than 100 million years, compared to pangaea’s 200 million years.

Keep tracing back the movements of the parts before the start of Pannotia, and the parts come together again 750 million years ago.  In fact the parts seem to have stayed together roughly from 1.1 billion years ago to 750 million years ago in an even earlier, Long lived supercontinent called Rodinia.  

Before rodinia, the picture gets more hazy due to passage of time and obliteration of evidence.  So specific movement, shape and location of earlier continental land masses become more difficult to reconstruct.  But there are hints that majority of continental mass on earth were assembled into large supercontinents periodically on at least 4-5 earlier occassions before Rodinia, going back 3 billion years.