Geologic Time And Earth History Flashcards

Pangaea or Pangea (derived from Παγγαία, Greek meaning "all earth") is the name given to the supercontinent that is thought to have existed during the Paleozoic and Mesozoic eras, before the process of plate tectonics separated each of the component continents into their current configuration.Pangaea was the most recent supercontinent to have existed and the first to be reconstructed by geologists. Fossil evidence for Pangaea includes the presence of similar and identical species on continents that The break-up of Pangaea continues today in the Red Sea Rift and East African Rift.But when there is more islands or separate land masses, this tends to produce more specialized species adapted to these unique environments. In general, when continents come together species diversity tends to go down and when big continents start to break up, species diversity tends to...How did Pangea affect Earth's climate? Pangea was immense and possessed a great degree of climatic Climatic patterns of the entire globe were affected by the presence of Pangea as well, since it Over millions of years, the continents broke apart from a single landmass called Pangea and..."It is the first in the world to be based on real-world data, showing that the vaccine is less effective against the South Africa variant, compared to both the original virus and the British variant," said Professor Ran Balicer, director of research at Clalit.

Pangaea Wiki

Pangaea or Pangea (pronunciation: /pænˈdʒiːə/) was a supercontinent that existed during the late Paleozoic and early Mesozoic eras. It assembled from earlier continental units approximately 300 million years ago, and it began to break apart about 175 million years ago.When Pangaea broke up, species had to adapt to changing environments. Pangaea began to break up in the Jurassic Period about 180 million years ago and was mostly broken up by 100 million years ago.The breakup of the Pangaea supercontinent. The explanation for Pangaea's formation ushered in the modern theory of plate tectonics , which posits that the Earth's outer shell is broken up into several plates that slide over Earth's rocky shell, the mantle.Top questions with pangaea how were species affected by the breakup of pangaea? when did pangaea begin to break up?

How did Pangaea affect life? + Example

LA Pangaea is a nation with diverse options, given relatively unimpressive magical depth. This guide is meant to describe as many of those options as First, I look at the commanders and units available to Pan, and briefly describe their abilities, and how those abilities correspond to their roles they can take.Our models show the effects of simulated geological events that affect all species equally, without the added complexity of further ecological processes. We conclude that continental drift by itself is not sufficient to account for the increase in terrestrial species richness observed in the fossil record.But very few of us know that the Maya were not the earliest civilization on the American continent. The first great group of people there were the mysterious Now there are only ruins left of Hadrian's Wall. 4. The largest development in the debate among scientists about what killed the prehistoric dinosaurs...Pangaea synonyms, Pangaea pronunciation, Pangaea translation, English dictionary definition of Pangaea. A supercontinent made up of all the world's present landmasses as they are thought to have been According to the theory of plate tectonics, Pangaea later broke up into Laurasia and...Pangea began to break up about 200 million years ago as a result of the movement of the Earth's Pangaea was made up of multiple plates, called tectonic plates. Over time, Tectonic plates shift or What is more debatable it how did Pangaea come into existence, a land mas that shows no sign of life.

About three hundred million years ago, Earth didn't have seven continents, however as a substitute one large supercontinent referred to as Pangaea, which used to be surrounded by a single ocean known as Panthalassa.

The explanation for Pangaea's formation ushered in the fashionable principle of plate tectonics, which posits that the Earth's outer shell is damaged up into several plates that slide over Earth's rocky shell, the mantle.

Over the course of the planet's 3.Five billion-year history, several supercontinents have formed and broken up, a consequence of churning and stream in the Earth's mantle, which makes up maximum of planet's quantity. This breakup and formation of supercontinents has dramatically altered the planet's historical past.

"This is what's driven the entire evolution of the planet through time. This is the major backbeat of the planet," stated Brendan Murphy, a geology professor at the St. Francis Xavier University, in Antigonish, Nova Scotia.

History

More than a century ago, the scientist Alfred Wegener proposed the perception of an historical supercontinent, which he named Pangaea (occasionally spelled Pangea), after striking together a number of traces of proof.

The first and most evident was once that the "continents fit together like a tongue and groove," something that was rather noticeable on any correct map, Murphy said. Another telltale hint that Earth's continents were all one land mass comes from the geologic file. Coal deposits present in Pennsylvania have a similar composition to these spanning throughout Poland, Great Britain and Germany from the identical time frame. That signifies that North America and Europe will have to have once been a single landmass. And the orientation of magnetic minerals in geologic sediments reveals how Earth's magnetic poles migrated over geologic time, Murphy mentioned.

In the fossil file, an identical plants, reminiscent of the extinct seed fern Glossopteris, are discovered on now widely disparate continents. And mountain chains that now lie on different continents, similar to the Appalachians in the United States and the Atlas Mountains in Morocco, were all part of the Central Pangaea Mountains, shaped via the collision of the supercontinents Gondwana and Laurussia.

Pangaea formed through a gentle process spanning a few hundred million years. Beginning about 480 million years in the past, a continent referred to as Laurentia, which contains portions of North America, merged with several other micro-continents to shape Euramerica. Euramerica ultimately collided with Gondwana, some other supercontinent that incorporated Africa, Australia, South America and the Indian subcontinent.

About 200 million years in the past, the supercontinent began to break up. Gondwana (what is now Africa, South America, Antarctica, India and Australia) first break up from Laurasia (Eurasia and North America). Then about one hundred fifty million years ago, Gondwana broke up. India peeled off from Antarctica, and Africa and South America rifted, in step with a 1970 article in the Journal of Geophysical Research. Around 60 million years ago, North America split off from Eurasia.

Life and local weather

Having one huge landmass would have made for extraordinarily other climatic cycles. For example, the inner of the continent can have been utterly dry, because it was locked behind massive mountain chains that blocked all moisture or rainfall, Murphy stated.

But the coal deposits found in the United States and Europe divulge that parts of the ancient supercontinent near the equator will have to were a lush, tropical rainforest, similar to the Amazonian jungle, Murphy stated. (Coal forms when lifeless crops and animals sink into swampy water, the place drive and water develop into the subject matter into peat, then coal.)

"The coal deposits are essentially telling us that there was plentiful life on land," Murphy informed Live Science.

Climate fashions ascertain that the continental inner of Pangaea was once extremely seasonal, in line with a 2016 article in the magazine Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology. The researchers in this find out about used biological and bodily knowledge from the Moradi Formation, a region of layered paleosols (fossil soils) in northern Niger, to reconstruct the ecosystem and climate right through the time frame when Pangaea existed. Comparable to the modern-day African Namib Desert and the Lake Eyre Basin in Australia, the climate was usually arid with quick, recurring rainy classes that once in a while integrated catastrophic flash floods.

Pangaea existed for A hundred million years, and during that time period a number of animals flourished, together with the Traversodontidae, a circle of relatives of plant-eating animals that incorporates the ancestors of mammals.

During the Permian period, insects such as beetles and dragonflies flourished. But the lifestyles of Pangaea overlapped with the worst mass extinction in historical past, the Permian-Triassic (P-TR) extinction tournament. Also referred to as the Great Dying, it occurred round 252 million years ago and led to maximum species on Earth to go extinct. The early Triassic length saw the upward thrust of archosaurs, a bunch of animals that at last gave upward push to crocodiles and birds, and a plethora of reptiles. And about 230 million years ago some of the earliest dinosaurs emerged on Pangaea, including theropods, in large part carnivorous dinosaurs that most commonly had air-filled bones and feathers similar to birds.

Cycle in history

The present configuration of continents is not going to be the final. Supercontinents have formed a number of occasions in Earth's history, best to be split off into new continents. Right now for example, Australia is inching toward Asia, and the eastern portion of Africa is slowly peeling off from the rest of the continent.

Geologists have noticed that there's a quasi-regular cycle wherein supercontinents shape and break up each and every three hundred to four hundred million years, however precisely why is a mystery, Murphy mentioned. But most scientists consider that the supercontinent cycle is largely driven by move dynamics in the mantle, according to a 2010 article in the Journal of Geodynamics.

Beyond that, the main points get fuzzy. While the heat shaped in the mantle most probably comes from the radioactive decay of risky elements, comparable to uranium, scientists don't agree on whether there are mini-pockets of warmth waft within the mantle, or if the entire shell is one giant warmth conveyor belt, Murphy stated.

Current analysis

Scientists have created mathematical, three-D simulations to raised perceive the mechanisms in the back of continental motion. In a 2017 article in Geoscience Frontiers, scientists Masaki Yoshida and M. Santhosh give an explanation for how they produced simulations of large-scale continental movements since the breakup of Pangaea 200 million years in the past. The fashions display how tectonic plate motion and mantle convection forces worked in combination to break apart and move huge land masses. For instance, Pangaea's extensive mass insulated the mantle beneath, inflicting mantle flows that prompted the initial breakup of the supercontinent. Radioactive decay of the upper mantle additionally raised the temperature, inflicting upward mantle flows that broke off the Indian subcontinent and initiated its northern motion.

Yoshida and Santos created further geological models to expect mantle convection and continental motion patterns 250 million years in the future. These fashions recommend that over millions of years, the Pacific Ocean will close as Australia, North America, Africa, and Eurasia come together in the Northern Hemisphere. Eventually, these continents will merge, forming a supercontinent known as "Amasia." The two ultimate continents, Antarctica and South America, are predicted to remain slightly immobile and separate from the new supercontinent.

Additional reporting by Carol Stoll, Live Science contributor

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