Pangaea

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For other uses, see Pangaea (disambiguation).

Map of Pangaea with modern continents outlined

Pangaea or Pangea (/pænˈdʒiːə/^[1]) was a supercontinent that existed during the late Paleozoic and early Mesozoic eras.^[2] It formed approximately 300 million years ago and then began to break apart after about 100 million years.^[3] Unlike the present Earth, much of the land mass was in the Southern Hemisphere. Pangaea was the first reconstructed supercontinent and its global ocean was accordingly named Panthalassa.

Contents

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• 1 Origin of the concept
• 2 Formation of Pangaea
• 3 Evidence of existence
• 4 Rifting and break-up
• 5 See also
• 6 References
• 7 External links

Origin of the concept[edit]

The name is derived from Ancient Greek pan (πᾶν, "all, entire, whole") and Gaia (Γαῖα, "Mother Earth, land").^[4][9] The supercontinent's name was coined during a 1927 symposium discussing Alfred Wegener's theory of continental drift.^{[citation needed]} In his book The Origin of Continents and Oceans (Die Entstehung der Kontinente und Ozeane), first published in 1915, he postulated that prior to breaking up and drifting to their present locations, all the continents had at one time formed a singlesupercontinent which he called the "Urkontinent". The name occurs in the 1920 and 1922 editions of Die Entstehung der Kontinente und Ozeane, but only once, when Wegener refers to the ancient supercontinent as "the Pangaea of the Carboniferous".^[10]

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  Pangaea forming
 
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  Pangaea during Permian
 
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  Pangaea during Triassic