Supercontinent Amasia may form in about 300 million years

Sign up for CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news on fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements and more.

CNN
 — 

The world may have a new supercontinent within 200 million to 300 million years as the Pacific Ocean shrinks and closes.

Researchers at Curtin University in Australia and Peking University in China used a supercomputer to model the evolution of Earth’s tectonic plates and the formation of a future supercontinent. The journal National Science Review published their findings on September 28.

“Over the past two billion years, Earth’s continents have collided together to form a supercontinent every 600 million years, known as the supercontinent cycle. This means that the current continents are due to come together again in a couple of hundred of million years’ time,” said lead author Dr. Chuan Huang, a research fellow in Curtin’s Earth Dynamics Research Group and the School of Earth and Planetary Sciences, in a statement.

The formation of supercontinents has occurred in widely varying ways, scientists believe.

The team’s simulation showed that due to the fact that Earth has been cooling for billions of years since its formation, the thickness and strength of the tectonic plates beneath the oceans have reduced over time.

This natural process would hinder the next supercontinent from forming as a result of the shrinking of the Atlantic or Indian oceans, which scientists consider to be relatively young oceans. These oceans likely formed when the most recent supercontinent on Earth broke apart and the various pieces slowly drifted from one another.

Called Pangaea, the land mass formed around 320 million years ago, according to the study authors. It broke apart between 170 million and 180 million years ago, when dinosaurs walked the Earth.

In contrast, the Pacific Ocean is the oldest ocean on Earth. This vast body of water is actually the remnant of the Panthalassa superocean that started to form 700 million years ago as a supercontinent even more ancient than Pangaea began to break apart.

The study team found that when the tectonic plates diminish in strength and thickness, the formation of a new supercontinent is more likely to happen by the closing up of a former superocean that had surrounded a past…