Jakki wrote:
So it causes me to wonder if the Continents are still growing farther apart .?
As we speak North America and Europe are moving apart at about..."the length of your body in the length of your lifetime (if you're a six foot man)" as our geology professor would say. One inch a year.
As we speak the continent of Africa is being wrenched apart into two new future continents along "the Great Rift Valley".
The continents tend to...break apart...drift away from each other...and then ram into each other on the opposite side of the globe to form new "supercontinents". On top of that they also can...stop in their tracks...and reverse and run back into each other where they started. Just to complicate things.
But the point is that though we all know about Pangea (the original one big super continent) - and how it broke up into the modern continents starting about 250 million years ago...we forget that Pangea itself was formed by earlier continents slamming together to form it...continents that originated from ...an earlier one supercontinent.
So...you can view it has a cycle...a 300 million year cycle in which continents unify and break apart. So if the process started 3.2 billion years ago then there may have been ten "generations" of continents. Ten Pangeas.
26 Jul 2023, 4:49 pm
