Continental Drift and Pangaea
Pangaea was a supercontinent that existed during the late eras. It assembled approximately
335 million years ago, and it began to break apart about 175 million years ago. In contrast to the
present Earth and its distribution of continental mass, much of Pangaea was in the southern
hemisphere and surrounded by a super ocean, Panthalassa. Pangaea was the most recent
supercontinent to have existed and the first to be reconstructed by geologists.
At the beginning of the 20th century a geologist named Alfred Wagner published his theory
that earth’s landmasses drifted across each sometimes moving through oceans and into one
another. Wagner was convinced that all of earths landmasses were once part of a single landmass
called Pangaea,
Wagner studied many fossils on different land masses to prove his theory he found that there
were fossils of early plants in continents and biomes that they could not live In he suggested that
these plants were once in a different climate.
Today, scientists think that there were many landmasses that were formed and broke apart
like the landmass Pannotia, which was formed 600 million years ago ,and Rodinia, which existed
more than a billion years ago, but scientists do not accept Wagner’s theory because there many
ideas that are still unknown like what is the mechanism of the drift and why did they drift and
what patterns they followed. Wagner suggested that the rotation of earth is the cause of the drift
but that is not true.
Scientists know that the continents rest on massive slabs of rock called tectonic plates. The
plates are always moving in a process called plate tectonics. Pangaea's formation is now
commonly explained in terms of plate tectonics. The involvement of plate tectonics in Pangaea's
separation helps to show how it did not separate all at once, but at different times, in sequences.
Additionally, after these separations, it has also been discovered that the separated land masses
may have also continued to break apart multiple times. The formation of each environment and
climate on Pangaea is due to plate tectonics.
The separation of the continents lead to the formation of new oceans and new relocations of
landmasses. This lead to changes in sea levels which affected the warmth and cool of oceans and
seas which affected the climate on earth. And also climate was changed from the changes of the
cycles of evaporation and moisture levels in the air and earth’s atmosphere
Therefore, Pangaea is a theory that might be true since continents are still moving and might
continue to move and studies about Alfred Wagner’s theory are still being made till the present
day.
Abdullah Kabli
11M
sources:
National Geographic
Wikipedia