Pangaea, the Supercontinent

ng before humans walked on this planet - more than 300 - 200 million years ago - there was one supercontinent called Pangaea. The name was given to this huge piece of land by scientist Alfred Wegener in his 1915 book The Origin of the Continents. yhr name comes from two Greek words - Pan meaning all and gaea referring to Mother Earth. Pangaea was surrounded by an ocean called Panthalassa.

You may have noticed that the coastline of South America seems to fit with that of Africa as if they were parts of a jigsaw puzzle. Once they were both part of Pangaea which was a C-shaped continent that included everything from the North Pole to the South Pole. Then seismic pressure in the Earth’s mantle (the outer layer) caused the continents to wrinkle and break apart. This created plate tectonics, a science which has only recently been understood. We now know that the rock that makes up today’s Newfoundland matches that of northern Africa.

There is plenty of other geological evidence of continental drift. Fossil evidence shows that plants that once lived on the same continent are now on different continents separated by oceans. Also. mountain ranges on different continents share similarities such as the Appalachians in the USA, and the Scandinavian Caledonian mountains of Europe which geologically belong to the same chain.

There were other supercontinents, too. Gowanda and Laurasia broke away to form Asia and Oceania. We now have six recognized continents - Asia, Africa, North America, South America, Antarctica, Australia and Europe.

Mother Earth hasn’t finished her work yet, so we can expect more changes in the years ahead. Some of them may be quite violent. We are just micro-infinitesimal punctuation marks on the world map.