The map that teaches us how the land will be within 250 million years

The present has accelerated so much that it gives the feeling that nothing that has no rhythm of ‘thriller’ has no interest. I do what I can to resist, but the truth is that the old movies seem very slow, the classic novels a stomach loss of time and even fast food seems made with a tempo capable of sleeping the sheep.

Luckily, We have plaque tectonics. Yes, that at first glance it is not exciting, but no branch of knowledge can make such huge changes with such small and imperceptible things. No branch of knowledge helps us understand how insignificant we are with just a walk through the mountain.

A long time ago, in a very, very … close galaxy. Specifically, it was one thousand eight hundred million years ago when Nuna He gathered in a single continent all the land not submerged. Then the different continents were separated and for seven hundred million years to gather in Rodinia.

It is nothing novel: that coming and going of supercontinents has been a constant in the history of the earth. The last and most famous, 300 million years ago, it was Pangea And one of the funniest things in the world is to see how it broke into pieces. In this video, you can see.

You can see more things, in fact. In the video, the team of researchers at the University of Sidney He has studied (and projected) Seismic data of the last hundred millions of years to teach us how, where what speed the current continents began to be as they are.

There are many curious things: Against the generalized idea, it can be verified that the continents do not move at the same speed. On the contrary! There are times that the cortex moves very slowly and sometimes very fast. In the Pangea division, as explained Dietmar Mullerthe cortex moved to about 20 millimeters per year. That is, the same speed with which they believe the fingers of the feet.

The big question is … when will it happen again? And the restaurant, really, is not simple. As we do not know how plaque tectonics works, there are a lot of models that try to predict the future of the earth’s crust. Have ‘Novopangea‘that suggests that all continent will eventually be around the current Pacific; WE HAVE A ‘Aurica‘With India in the center of the board and we also have a’Amasia‘. But above all, we have Pangea ultimate.

The upper image of coffete, It is based on the work of CR Scotese And add to the original image the place where the different countries would be.

And what will happen? According to this model, only New Zealand and Scotland will remain as isolated territories. The rest of the countries will merge into a huge mass of firm earth. America will be attached to Africa and Europe (with the United Kingdom well stuck to it) will be north of the earth’s mass. Spain, meanwhile, will continue to share its border with Portugal, Morocco and France, but Tunisia, Algeria and Italy will be added to the equation.

Nothing too different To the last PANGEAthe truth.

In Xataka | PANGEA, the gigantic unique contine

Image | Caffete

*An earlier version of this article was published in January 2024