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You Liked the Pangaea Supercontinent? Well, it's Coming Back

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Yazata Offline
Pangaea was the last Supercontinent, when all of today's continents were clumped together in one landmass surrounded by one giant superocean called Panthalassa. It formed out of unrecognizable early continents crashing together through continental drift very roughly 300 million years ago and gradually broke up into what would become our continents maybe 175 million years ago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pangaea

Current theory seems to be that these giant Supercontinents have formed and broken up repeatedly in Earth's history, with Pangaea just the latest one. It was probably the only one that existed when animal life existed on dry land though. The other Supercontinents would have existed when only single celled organisms existed in the oceans and probably along the tidal wetlands along the coasts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercontinent_cycle

Well, if you want to see another Supercontinent, it's hypothesized that another will be forming. It's being called Pangaea Proxima, the next Pangaea. This giant continent smashup should be happening within another 250 million years. Australia will crash through Indonesia and fuse with Southeast Asia. Africa will push north and squeeze away the Mediterranean and Red Seas. The Persian Gulf will go away. The Americas will grow closer together, rotate and fuse with Africa. And Antarctica will slip off the south pole and travel up the Indian Ocean until it crashes into Asia.

There's a cool animation of the next 250 million years in this tweet --

https://twitter.com/UniverCurious/status...6236068875

People (assuming that people still exist, with might be unlikely) 250 million years from now will be laughing at today's little pissant climate change. Their world will be almost totally unrecognizable. What once were our continents in different places, at different latitudes. Ocean currents totally different. Even figuring out where our countries and cities once existed in the geography of that age might be almost impossible.

Human beings have this conceit that the way things are now is how they have always been and how things will always be.

But 250 million years is a Long Time. The one thing I'm reasonably certain about Earth in that distant age is that it will still have life on it. What kind of life, there's no telling. Will there still be any descendants of humanity? Assuming they exist, will they be gods? Almost omniscient beings spread across the galaxy and as far beyond us as we are beyond lizards and fish? Or will our descendants have long since descended back to the level of beasts themselves? Will any of them know or care that humans like us once existed here?
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