NErd shirts are textiles with printed motifs from science and technology on which the wearer doesn't care whether people outside the relevant discipline find them funny or even understand them. A YouTube geologist recently commented on one of Iceland's volcanic eruptions wearing such a shirt that featured a somewhat strange map of the world with the words “Reunite Pangea!”
Pangea or Pangea was a so-called supercontinent. It was formed around 320 million years ago in the Late Era and united North America and Siberia, which had grown together with the Baltic states, with the ancient large continent of Gondwana – which in turn consisted of the landmasses of South America, Africa, India and Madagascar as well as Australia and Antarctica. Until Pangea began to break up again in the Jurassic period around 180 million years ago, all of the larger components of the continental crust were united. And the nerd shirt demands that this should happen again?
It will happen. And it is perhaps the safest prediction that earth science is capable of making, apart from the limited lifespan of the Earth itself, which simply follows from the fact that our sun is a star and stars do not last forever. But long before that, in 200 to 250 million years, the reunification of all continents will occur.
The lava spewing fissure in Iceland
Ross Mitchell, professor at the Institute of Geology and Geophysics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, has written a book about why this is so and what the next supercontinent might look like. It is special in that geology is not very often the subject of popular science efforts, and when they do, they rarely succeed as well as Mitchell's “The Next Supercontinent.” The titular landmass itself is actually only the subject of the last of the book's five chapters. But a certain amount of preparation is required if one wants to understand why the thesis of the great continental reunification is neither a case of nitpicking nor of particularly temporally over-extended science fiction, but rather the result of exact, sober science.
Because on the one hand there is the fact of the previous supercontinent, i.e. Pangeas. Its existence had already been suspected in 1912 by the German physicist and meteorologist Alfred Wegener and justified using a wealth of geological, paleontological and paleoclimatic arguments. It is linked to Wegener's hypothesis of drifting continents, which gave rise to the theory of plate tectonics after the Second World War, thanks to which we can understand phenomena such as the lava-spewing fissure in Iceland or the earthquake off Japan.
In his Pangea chapter, however, Mitchell does more than provide a general introduction to Wegener's idea. He quickly gets to talking about important elements of modern plate tectonics, such as the so-called Wilson cycle, in which oceans open and close again – right up to the sometimes demanding details of the current scientific discussion about it, although focused on those that he thinks are relevant to the question for the next supercontinent.
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