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Pangaea or Pangea (/ p æ n ˈ dʒ iː ə / pan-JEE-ə) [1] was a supercontinent that existed during the late Paleozoic and early Mesozoic eras. [2] It assembled from the earlier continental units of Gondwana , Euramerica and Siberia during the Carboniferous approximately 335 million years ago, and began to break apart about 200 million years ...
Animation of the break-up of the supercontinent Pangaea and the subsequent drift of its constituents, from the Early Triassic to recent (250 Ma to 0). This is a list of paleocontinents, significant landmasses that have been proposed to exist in the geological past. The degree of certainty to which the identified landmasses can be regarded as ...
Over tens of millions of years, as the familiar story goes, these giant hunks of rock slowly split apart, breaking up at a rate of just a millimeter — a little more than the thickness of a ...
Pangaea's supercontinent cycle is a good example of the efficiency of using the presence or lack of these entities to record the development, tenure, and break-up of supercontinents. There is a sharp decrease in passive margins between 500 and 350 Ma during the timing of Pangaea's assembly.
As the Triassic ended, Pangaea was breaking up into separate continents again. Rift valleys formed along the east coast as the North American, European and African plates diverged. [58] This process created rifts down the east coast to Florida. [47] One of these rift valleys was inundated with ocean water and became the young Atlantic Ocean.
Map of Pangaea with modern continental outlines. The supercontinent cycle is the quasi-periodic aggregation and dispersal of Earth's continental crust.There are varying opinions as to whether the amount of continental crust is increasing, decreasing, or staying about the same, but it is agreed that the Earth's crust is constantly being reconfigured.
It was accompanied by huge volcanic eruptions that occurred as the supercontinent Pangaea began to break apart about 202 to 191 million years ago (40Ar/39Ar dates), [69] forming the Central Atlantic Magmatic Province (CAMP), [70] one of the largest known inland volcanic events since the planet had first cooled and stabilized.
The monsoon circulation began to weaken through Jurassic time, when the continents started to drift apart. [3] Records indicate that large-scale atmospheric flow progressively returned to a primarily zonal pattern. [5] Climatic patterns therefore became less extreme across the continents.