Next supercontinent Amasia 'to form at north pole'

Birmingham Star (ANI) Thursday 9th February, 2012

America and Eurasia will crash into each other over the North Pole in 50-200 million years time, scientists have claimed.

According to scientists at Yale University, Africa and Australia will join the new "supercontinent" too, which will mark the next coming together of the Earth's land masses.

The continents are last thought to have come together 300 million years ago into a supercontinent called Pangaea.

The land masses of the Earth are constantly moving as the Earth's tectonic activity occurs. This generates areas such as the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, where Iceland has formed, and areas such as that off the coast of Japan, where one plate rides over another.

Geologists believe that, over billions of years, these shifting plates have driven the continents together periodically, creating the hypothesised supercontinents of Nuna 1.8 billion years ago, Rodinia a billion years ago, and then Pangaea 300 million years ago.

The next supercontinent has already been given the working title of Amasia, as it is expected to involve the convergence of the Americas and Asia.

What the researchers have set out to do is predict when and where it will form by looking back at where its predecessors emerged.

"We're all pretty familiar with the concept of Pangaea, but there hasn't been much convincing data to suggest how the supercontinents take shape," the BBC quoted Ross Mitchell from Yale University as saying.

"In our model, we actually have North America and South America joining by closing the Caribbean Sea and the Arctic Sea closing and connecting the Americas and Asia," Mitchell said.

The model puts the repositioned Americas within what is known as the Pacific "ring of fire". Europe, part of the Eurasian land mass, Africa and Australia are predicted to join the merging continent, with only Antarctica left out.

The prediction is based on analysis of magnetic data locked into rocks around the world, which betray the magnetic orientation of those rocks in past ages.

"Ancient rocks when they form, whether it's lava cooling or sedimentary rock solidifying, will lock in the magnetic orientation.

"But while this indicates latitude very accurately, historically we haven't had indicators of longitude.

"We found that after each historical supercontinent had assembled, this whole supercontinent would undergo a series of back-and-forth rotations about a stable axis on the equator," Mitchell said.

This led them to the view that that each successive supercontinent forms 90 degrees away from its predecessor. Previous studies have suggested supercontinents would form either in the same part of the globe or on alternating sides of the globe.

The study has been published in the journal Nature. (ANI)