(ORDO NEWS) — Over the next 300 million years, all of Earth‘s continents will collide and form a new supercontinent called Amasia, according to a study by scientists from Curtin University published in the National Science Review. This, in turn, will lead to the disappearance of the Pacific Ocean.
“Over the past two billion years, Earth’s continents have repeatedly collided with each other, leading to the formation of a supercontinent every 600 million years,” said Dr. Chuan Hung, lead author of the study from the Earth Dynamics Research Group and Curtin University’s School of Earth and Planetary Sciences. “This means that in 200-300 million years the current continents should come together again.”
Continental confluence
To determine the time frame, the researchers resorted to four-dimensional geodynamic modeling of the Earth’s tectonic plates, determined to find out why previous supercontinents formed in completely different ways.
Two forms of supercontinent “assembly” have been proposed:
- Introversion occurs when the continents “close” over the inland ocean that formed when the previous supercontinent broke apart.
- Extraversion implies “overlapping” the outer super-ocean surrounding the previous super-continent.
During the study, it was found that the total thickness (thickness) of the oceanic lithosphere determines which form of assembly will be responsible for the formation of the supercontinent, and this made it possible to establish that it is extraversion that will be responsible for the appearance of the next supercontinent.
In this case, the former super-ocean is the Pacific Ocean, which is a remnant of the Panthalassa super-ocean that began to form 700 million years ago when the previous super-continent Pangea began to break up.
“The new supercontinent has already been named Amasia because some researchers believe that the Pacific Ocean will be closed off [as opposed to the Atlantic and Indian Oceans] when America collides with Asia,” Huang added.
“Australia is also expected to play its part in this major Earth event, first colliding with Asia and then connecting the Americas and Asia after the Pacific closure.”
This study is one of the attempts to predict the distant future of our planet. Recall that this is not the only hypothesis about the “shifting of the continents”; for example, there is the model of Pangea Ultima (Pangaea Proxima), which assumes that the Pacific Ocean will remain, but the Atlantic and Indian will disappear.
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