The landmass known as Gondwana comprised most of what is present-day Antarctica, South America, Africa, Madagascar, Australia-New Guinea, and New Zealand, as well as Arabia and the Indian subcontinent of the Northern hemisphere.
Some 250 to 180 million years ago, it formed part of the single supercontinent Pangea.
Now, Eagles, working with Matthais König from the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Bremerhaven, Germany, has devised a new computer model for the evolution of this landmass.
The calculations show that the supercontinent was simply too big to stay in one piece and cracked apart forming two enormous land masses.
Details of the research are published this month in the Geophysical Journal International.
Reading this makes me wonder again if the breaking apart of the super-continent was in essence, the Earth balancing herself out? If you put extra weight on just one side of a top, it won’t spin very well, but half the weight on opposite sides and it still spins just fine.
They just found materials up a Tibetan mountain that shouldn’t be there, if the mountain range were formed millions and millions of years ago as theory predicts. Instead the latest work suggests just a couple of million years ago instead…
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Every time we think we have it figured out, nature throws us that 107 mph curve ball.