The Earth has changed a lot during its long life of 4.5 billion years, experiencing all sorts of continental configurations, including times when almost all of the land on the planet formed one giant supercontinent. Our future could be like this. The Pacific Ocean is dying: it shrinks by about three centimeters every year. And, thanks to various calculations, scientists point out that little by little a new “supercontinent” will emerge as a result of this process.
The new continent will be called: Amasia.
The study. Researchers at Curtin University in Australia, led by geologist Chuan Huang, simulated Earth’s future with a supercomputer and what they visualized left them stunned. The results, published in National Science Review, suggest that a new supercontinent will form when the Pacific Ocean disappears in about 200 million years, causing North America to crash into Asia. The piece of land that will be formed will be immense.
the death of the pacific. This great ocean is actually the remains of the Panthalassa superocean, which began to form 700 million years ago. It is the oldest ocean we have on Earth and has been shrinking since the time of the dinosaurs. What characterizes it is that it houses numerous subduction zones, that is, places where tectonic plates collide and mount one on top of the other. Known colloquially as the “ring of fire”, they function almost as drains to the bottom of the ocean.
Every year, a few centimeters of the Pacific plate slides under the Eurasian plate and the Indo-Australian plate, reducing the distance between North America, Asia and Australia.
What is Amasia? A new supercontinent. The word itself is a portmanteau of America and Asia and has been debated by scientific communities for more than a decade, although there are questions as to whether it would form “from the inside in,” a process known as introversion, or “from the outside in.” inside,” called extraversion. The first implies the closure of the oceans after Pangea, such as the Indian or the Atlantic, while the second indicates the closure of the Pacific Ocean.
This new study bets on the latter theory: that the oceanic crust of “young” oceans, such as the 100-million-year-old Atlantic or Indian, is less likely to subduct into the Earth’s mantle compared to ancient oceans such as the Peaceful.
A constantly changing planet. The Earth has been changing throughout its lifetime. In 4,500 million years it has had different forms. We currently live on the fragmented remnants of the Pangea supercontinent, which formed 335 million years ago and disintegrated during the rise of the dinosaurs. In fact, the existence of even older supercontinents, such as Rodinia and Columbia, suggests that the Earth is trapped in a “supercontinent cycle,” in which these gigantic landmasses are formed and destroyed every 600 million years.
Other hypotheses. And this is just the latest study in a long string of supercontinent simulations, all of which have tried to predict what our planet will look like in the future. In one possible scenario a supercontinent called Novopangea forms, the Americas collide with Antarctica before crashing into Eurasia and Africa. In another scenario, Aurica forms: both the Pacific and Atlantic oceans close, and a new ocean basin emerges in its place.
Contrary to other theories, this new one suggests that the Pacific Ocean, and not the Atlantic Ocean or the Caribbean Sea, will be destroyed when Amasia forms. Whatever the outcome, the Earth and its oceans will never be the same. A reminder that humans have lived very little on this planet. And that the Earth as we know it will be totally different in the future. But that, of course, we will not see.