Pangaea Ultima: The supercontinent of future Earth

The world is a smaller place these days, they say, as technology and the internet make it easier to travel and communicate between continents. However, in the future, it won't just be technology drawing us closer but the actual Earth itself, as our continents join up again to form a massive supercontinent called Pangaea Ultima.

Hundreds of millions of years ago, the continents that are so familiar to us now were joined together in one supercontinent called Pangaea, but it wasn't until much more recently that we had any idea that such a thing had ever existed. It was over 50 years ago now that scientists discovered a strange pattern of alternating 'magnetic striping' on the ocean floors, where magnetic fields in the rock were pointing in opposite directions. It was a controversial topic at the time, but these alternating bands told a story of a conveyor belt-like spreading of the ocean floor, and therefore moving continents.

[ Related: Earthquake sounds its own tsunami warning ]

In fact, the idea was so 'out there' that two different science journals rejected letters written about the subject by Canadian geologist Lawrence Morley, but British geophysicist Frederick Vine and his adviser Drummond Matthews were able to publish a paper on the idea in September of 1963. It took time to win the science community over, but now, nearly 50 years later, the 'Morley–Vine–Matthews hypothesis' is recognized as the basis for plate tectonics, and this science has allowed us not only to see what the Earth's continents looked like in the past (Pangaea), but it also tells us what the continents will probably look like in the future.

Now, we're talking about hundreds of millions of years again, so don't start planning your transcontinental walking trip just yet. However, based on what geologists and geophysicists are seeing with the behaviour of the tectonic plates now, they figure that about 250 million years from now, the Earth will have a new supercontinent, which they've called Pangaea Proxima or Pangaea Ultima.

What will this new supercontinent look like?

The map at the top of the article — Future World or Pangaea Ultima — was designed by Dr. Christopher R. Scotese, a geologist at the University of Texas, for his PALEOMAP Project. The project plots out the movement of the continents due to plate tectonics back over 1 billion years into the past, and looks forward to 250 million years into the future.

Based on how the continents moved in the past, and how they're moving now, it's likely that North America and South America will eventually be pushed to the east by the massive Pacific Plate, forcing them to swallow up the Atlantic Ocean as they move back towards Europe and Africa. Meanwhile, Africa will push north into Europe, possibly creating mountains that dwarf Mount Everest in the process. As for Australia, it's expected to either move northwest to crash into Asia (Pangaea Proxima), or it will slip southwest to meet up with Antarctica (Pangaea Ultima).

This isn't the only way it could happen, though. Predicting the movement of all the tectonic plates isn't exactly an easy task (otherwise earthquake prediction would be a cinch), so over the years two other possibilities have cropped up: Novopangaea and Amasia. Both of these have the Atlantic Ocean continuing to spread, forcing North America and South America to slam into eastern Asia, with Australia caught between them. The only difference between the two, it seems, is that Novopangaea is the case where Antarctica floats up to get mashed in with the rest — crammed between Asia, Australia and South America — and Amasia is the case where Antarctica stays where it's at now.

[ More Geekquinox: Chris Hadfield to retire from Canadian Space Agency ]

This is all speculation of course, and it's likely that humans (at least as we are now) won't be around in 250 million years to see which of these forecasts is the right one (or if they're all wrong). However, it's not blind speculation.

If you'll pardon the pun, there is some very solid science behind geophysics and plate tectonics — so much so that we can not only 'hindcast' what the Earth looked like 250 million years ago, but also forecast what it will look like 250 million years from now. It doesn't come close to astronomy, but there aren't too many other sciences that can 'see' things out that far.

(Image courtesy: Dr. Christopher R. Scotese/Wikimedia Commons)

Geek out with the latest in science and weather.
Follow @ygeekquinox on Twitter!