What the World Will Look Like in 250 Million Years: Mapping the Distant Future

Most of us now settle for the concept that all of Earth­’s con­ti­nents had been as soon as a part of a sin­gle, enor­mous land mass. That was­n’t the case within the ear­ly 9­teen-tens, when the geol­o­gist Alfred Wegen­er (1880–1930) first pub­li­cized his the­o­ry of not simply the tremendous­con­ti­nent Pangea, but additionally of the phe­nom­e­non of con­ti­nen­tal drift that prompted it to interrupt aside into the sequence of shapes everyone knows from class­room world maps. However as humor­ous­ly defined in the Map Males video above, Wegen­er did­n’t dwell to see these concepts con­vince the world. Solely after his dying did oth­er sci­en­tists fig­ure out simply how the geo­log­i­cal churn­ing below the plan­et’s sur­face prompted the con­ti­nents to float aside within the first place.

With that infor­ma­tion in place, Pangea not appeared just like the crack­pot notion it had when Wegen­er ini­tial­ly professional­posed it. Much less large­ly appre­ci­at­ed, even right this moment, is the deter­mi­na­tion that, because the Map Males put it, “Pangea, removed from being the orig­i­nal tremendous­con­ti­nent, was actu­al­ly the eleventh to have fashioned in Earth­’s his­to­ry.”

Plainly the con­ti­nents have been cycli­cal­ly break­ing aside and com­ing togeth­er once more, with no signal of the method cease­ping. When, then, will we subsequent discover our­selves again on a brilliant­con­ti­nent? Per­haps in 250 mil­lion years or so, accord­ing to the “Novopangea” mod­el defined within the video, which has the Pacif­ic ocean clos­ing up as Aus­tralia slots into East Asia and North Amer­i­ca whereas Antarc­ti­ca drifts north.

Oth­er mod­els additionally exist, includ­ing Auri­ca, “the place Eura­sia splits in half, and each the Pacif­ic and Atlantic oceans shut up”; Pangea Ulti­ma, “the place Britain will get clos­er to Amer­i­ca”; and Ama­sia, “the place all of the con­ti­nents con­gre­gate across the North Pole, besides Antarc­ti­ca” (whose drift pat­terns make it look like “the lazi­est con­ti­nent”). At this type of time scale, small modifications within the primary assump­tions may end up in very dif­fer­ent-look­ing tremendous­con­ti­nents certainly, not that any of us can be round to see how the following Pangea actual­ly takes form. Nev­er­the­much less, on this age once we can exhausting­ly go per week with­out encoun­ter­ing pre­dic­tions of human­i­ty’s immi­nent extinc­tion, it’s refresh­ing to discover a sub­ject that lets us even con­sid­er look­ing a quar­ter-bil­lion years down the highway.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Bil­lion Years of Tec­ton­ic-Plate Transfer­ment in 40 Sec­onds: A Fast Glimpse of How Our World Took Form

The Plate Tec­ton­ic Evo­lu­tion of the Earth Over 500 Mil­lion Years: Ani­mat­ed Video Takes You from Pangea, to 250 Mil­lion Years within the Future

Map Present­ing The place Right now’s Coun­tries Would Be Locat­ed on Pangea

Pangea to the Current to the Future: Watch Ani­ma­tions Present­ing 500 Mil­lion Years of Con­ti­nen­tal Drift

Paper Ani­ma­tion Tells Curi­ous Sto­ry of How a Mete­o­rol­o­gist The­o­rized Pan­gaea & Con­ti­nen­tal Drift (1910)

A Net Website That Lets You Discover Your House Deal with on Pangea

Primarily based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His tasks embody the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the ebook The State­much less Metropolis: a Stroll by means of Twenty first-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social internet­work for­mer­ly often known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.