Latest Pangaea Stories

Lawrence LeBlond for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online First mentioned in two dialogues (Timaeus and Critias) by Plato in 360 BC, the legendary island of Atlantis has long been sought by historians, archaeologists, and explorers alike. Said to have originally existed between South America and Africa, this sunken island has been searched for in no less than dozens of locations worldwide, from Bimini to the Black Sea. In a new twist, a team of scientists from Brazil and Japan say they...

Brett Smith for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Tales of submerged or ‘lost’ areas of land have been prevalent in popular culture since the days of Plato. Yet, while we never found the lost city of Atlantis, an international group of scientists has found evidence of an ancient micro-continent resting beneath two islands in the Indian Ocean. Until around 750 million years ago, all of the dry land on Earth was collected into a single continent called Rodinia, the older...

Cypress distribution reflects the breakup of Pangaea In classical mythology, the cypress tree is associated with death, the underworld and eternity. Indeed, the family to which cypresses belong, is an ancient lineage of conifers, and a new study of their evolution affords a unique insight into a turbulent era in the Earth’s history. During the geological era known as the Mesozoic, the continental crust was concentrated in a single huge landmass, the supercontinent Pangea. Pangea began...

All of Earth's continents, believed to have once been joined together as a supercontinent known as Pangaea, will be reunited as a single landmass near the North Pole within the next 50 million to 200 million years, researchers from Yale University claim in a new study. According to MSNBC Science Editor Alan Boyle, the Yale researchers, including geologist Ross Mitchell, used a computer model to determine the estimated location of the new supercontinent, which they have dubbed Amasia due to...

[ Watch the Video ] Geologist John Goodge looks for clues about Antarctica's past in the 2 percent of the continent that is not covered in ice! The University of Minnesota-Duluth professor has been visiting Antarctica since 1985, finding and studying rocks that help tell the story of how this desolate continent has formed and changed over time. In late 2010 and early 2011, he spent several weeks in the field, with other scientists, visiting a dozen sites along 1,200 miles of...

The Earth was a much different place 1.1 billion years ago. Researchers are discovering strong evidence that parts of what are now Texas and Antarctica were connected, according to Staci Loewy, a geochemist at California State University, Bakersfield. "I can go to the Franklin Mountains in West Texas and stand next to what was once part of Coats Land in Antarctica," says Loewy, "That's so amazing."Long before the supercontinent Pangaea formed, there were other landforms bouncing around on the...

More than 200 million years ago, mammals and reptiles lived in their own separate worlds on the supercontinent Pangaea, despite little geographical incentive to do so. Mammals lived in areas of twice-yearly seasonal rainfall; reptiles stayed in areas where rains came just once a year. Mammals lose more water when they excrete, and thus need water-rich environments to survive. Results are published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.Aggregating nearly the entire landmass of...

The Gondwana supercontinent underwent a 60-degree rotation across Earth's surface during the Early Cambrian period, according to new evidence uncovered by a team of Yale University geologists. Gondwana made up the southern half of Pangaea, the giant supercontinent that constituted the Earth's landmass before it broke up into the separate continents we see today. The study, which appears in the August issue of the journal Geology, has implications for the environmental conditions that...

AMSTERDAM, July 29, 2010 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- - Elsevier Articles now Graphically Enriched With Information From PANGAEA Data Sets Elsevier, a world-leading publisher of scientific, technical and medical information products and services, and PANGAEA - Publishing Network for Geoscientific & Environmental Data - today announced their next step in interconnecting the diverse elements of scientific research. Elsevier articles at ScienceDirect are now enriched with...

Princeton University scientists have shown that, in ancient times, the Earth's magnetic field was structured like the two-pole model of today, suggesting that the methods geoscientists use to reconstruct the geography of early land masses on the globe are accurate. The findings may lead to a better understanding of historical continental movement, which relates to changes in climate.By taking a closer look at the 1.1 billion-year-old volcanic rocks on the north shore of Lake Superior, the...