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The Earth's Known SuperContinents
analise.dubner Pangea, right? Right? Not really. Despite the fact that most people have only ever heard of the one supercontinent, our planet has had a number of them. Earth's land masses - never content to just sit around and think deep thoughts - have been on the move. And like any massive, slow-moving behemoth, these babies are hard to steer. They crash into each other a lot (geologically speaking) and create these monstrous landmasses.
We are living through a relatively rare period of time in our planet's history, when the continents are comfortably spread out with plenty of elbow room, but there have been a number of periods when they were all smashed together in one configuration or another.
We are living through a relatively rare period of time in our planet's history, when the continents are comfortably spread out with plenty of elbow room, but there have been a number of periods when they were all smashed together in one configuration or another.
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Vaalbara
«»Formed: 3.3 Billion Years Ago?
We know very little about the first continent (though, not exactly super, since there wasn't much land in those days), so the shape, size and scale of the theorized Vaalbara is pretty speculative. The two oldest cratons on the planet both have the oldest rock dated, so assumptions are made about what Vaalbara might have looked like based only on these two patches of oldness. It's named for the 'Brangelina' style mashup of the two cratons: the South African Kaapvaal Craton and the Australian Pilbara Craton. Paleomagnetic data from both these areas show that these two cratons could have been from the same supercontinent.
The same evidence that shows the possible existence of Vaalbara also indicates that it started to break up after 2.5 billion years.1 of 9
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The Earth's Known SuperContinents at 2/07/2013 1:30 PM