One Giant, Human-Killing Supercontinent

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When a new supercontinent forms, it could be enough to send temperatures rising even more steeply than they already are. So steep, in fact, it would make Earth inhospitable to land mammals—including humans.

This is all according to a recent study published in Nature Geoscience, led by researchers from the University of Bristol, that used hundreds of supercomputer simulations to track Earth’s tectonic movements and the ensuing changes to Earth’s climate.

“All life will eventually perish in a runaway greenhouse once absorbed solar radiation exceeds the emission of thermal radiation in several billions of years,” the authors wrote in the study. But that doesn’t mean we can go on living on Earth until that happens. “Conditions rendering the Earth naturally inhospitable to mammals may develop sooner because of long-term processes linked to plate tectonics.”

The authors wrote that, within 250 million years, all the continents will converge to form Earth’s next supercontinent: Pangea Ultima. “A natural consequence of the creation and decay of Pangea Ultima will be extremes,” they wrote.

The eventual formation of another supercontinent has been proposed before, but while others have proposed various options for what that and mass might look like, this new study seems pretty certain of a bleak picture. According to the researchers, the formation of the supercontinent may be the next major cause of extreme climate swings. The researchers state that Earth has seen at least five periods of tectonic convergent cycles that resulted in continental assembly. Those coincide with large variations in global temperature.