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Tag: Gondwana

Pangea

Reconstruction of the supercontinent Pangea (or Pangaea) that existed during the late Paleozoic and early Mesozoic eras.

Reconstruction of the supercontinent Pangea (or Pangaea) that existed during the late Paleozoic and early Mesozoic eras. During the Carboniferous approximately 335 Million years ago, Pangea assembled from the earlier continental fragments of Gondwana, Euramerica, and Siberia, and started to break apart about 200 Million years ago, at the end of the Triassic and beginning of the Jurassic. Pangea extended between Earth’s northern and southern polar regions and was surrounded by the Panthalassa Ocean and the Paleo-Tethys and subsequent Tethys Oceans. Pangea is the most recent supercontinent to have existed and the first that was reconstructed by geoscientists.

Here shown is not only the position of the continents, but also the reconstruction of the Earth’s surface paleotopography and paleobathymetry from Scotese & Wright (2018) paleo-digital elevation model (PaleoDEMS). The Scientific colour map ‘bukavu‘ is used to represent data accurately and to all readers.

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Continental drift hypothesis

The comparison of geographic and geologic continental features across oceans that encouraged the continental drift hypothesis.

The comparison of continental coastline geometries, rock types and patterns, fossils, and glacial formations across oceans that encouraged the continental drift hypothesis.

This map displays a simplified view of the early supercontinent Gondwana. During the time of Gondwana, present-day continents were geographically assembled like a jigsaw puzzle. Continental deformation such as mountain chains, glacial erosion patterns, and the distribution of plants and animals left their marks across the entire supercontinent. When it eventually split up, at around 180 Million years ago, some of these marks were preserved in the geologic record of the dispersed present-day continents.

Geologists, amongst which Antonio Snider-Pellegrini and Alfred Wegener, realised that some of the fossils of similar organisms matched across the present-day continents and encouraged the revolutionary theory of continental drift. Continental drift describes one of the earliest ways geologists thought continents moved over time. More than fifty years later, this theory evolved into the concept of Ocean-plate tectonics, that describes the plate motion at the Earth’s surface as the uppermost dynamic part of mantle convection, the overturn of Earth’s solid but viscous silicate mantle.

The typeface ‚Fufu‘ by Lucia Perez-Diaz is used.

  • Transparent background
  • Light & dark background versions
  • Colour-vision deficiency friendly
  • Readable in black&white
Download

Faulty or missing link? – Please report them via a reply below!

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