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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.
A supercontinent cycle is the break-up of one supercontinent and the development of another, which takes place on a global scale. [4] Supercontinent cycles are not the same as the Wilson cycle, which is the opening and closing of an individual oceanic basin. The Wilson cycle rarely synchronizes with the timing of a supercontinent cycle. [1]
Pangaea is the most recent supercontinent reconstructed from the geologic record and therefore is by far the best understood. The formation of supercontinents and their breakup appears to be cyclical through Earth's history.
Pangaea Proxima (also called Pangaea Ultima, Neopangaea, and Pangaea II) is a possible future supercontinent configuration. Consistent with the supercontinent cycle, Pangaea Proxima could form within the next 250 million years.
Continental collisions are a critical part of the supercontinent cycle and have happened many times in the past. Ancient collision zones are deeply eroded but may still be recognized because these mark sites of intense deformation, metamorphism, and plutonic activity that separate tracts of continental crust having different geologic histories ...
Gondwana (/ ɡ ɒ n d ˈ w ɑː n ə /) [1] was a large landmass, sometimes referred to as a supercontinent.The remnants of Gondwana make up around two-thirds of today's continental area, including South America, Africa, Antarctica, Australia, Zealandia, Arabia, and the Indian Subcontinent.
Supercontinent cycle This page was last edited on 11 June 2022, at 07:42 (UTC). Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License ...
This marks the completion of the current supercontinent cycle, wherein the continents split apart and then rejoin each other about every 400–500 million years. [65] Once the supercontinent is built, plate tectonics may enter a period of inactivity as the rate of subduction drops by an order of magnitude. This period of stability could cause ...