[Rockhounds] How the next 'supercontinent' will form

[Kreigh Tomaszewski]

Nearly 500 years ago, the Flemish cartographer Geradus Mercator produced
one of the world's most important maps.

It certainly wasn't the first attempt at a world atlas, and it was not
particularly accurate either: Australia is absent, and the Americas are
only roughly drawn. Since then, cartographers have produced ever-more
precise versions of this continental arrangement, correcting for Mercator's
errors, as well the biases between hemispheres and latitudes created by his
projection. But Mercator's map, along with others produced by his
16th-Century contemporaries, revealed a truly global picture of Earth's
landmasses – a perspective that has persisted in people's minds ever since.

What Mercator didn't know is that the continents have not always been
arranged this way. He lived around 400 years before the theory of plate
tectonics was confirmed.

When looking at the positions of the seven continents on a map, it's easy
to assume that they are fixed. For centuries, human beings have fought wars
and made peace over their share of these territories, on the assumption
that their land – and that of their neighbours – has always been there, and
always will be.

>From the Earth's perspective, however, the continents are leaves drifting
across a pond. And human concerns are a raindrop on the leaf's surface. The
seven continents were once assembled in a single mass, a supercontinent
called Pangaea. And before that, there's evidence for others stretching
back over three billion years
<https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1674987113001576>:
Pannotia, Rodinia, Columbia/Nuna, Kenorland and Ur.

Geologists know that supercontinents disperse and assemble in cycles:
we're halfway
through one now <https://www.nature.com/articles/s43017-021-00160-0>. So,
what kind of supercontinent might lie in Earth's future? How will the
landmasses as we know them rearrange over the very long-term? It turns out
that there are at least four different trajectories that could lie ahead.
And they show that Earth's living beings will one day reside on a very
different planet, which looks more like an alien world.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220401-how-the-next-supercontinent-will-form