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According to the Pangaea Proxima hypothesis, the Atlantic and Indian Oceans will continue to get wider until new subduction zones bring the continents back together, forming a future Pangaea. Most continents and microcontinents are predicted to collide with Eurasia , just as they did when most continents collided with Laurentia .
During the 1960s, the theory of plate tectonics— based initially on the assumption that Earth's size remains constant, and relating the subduction zones to burying of lithosphere at a scale comparable to seafloor spreading [17] —became the accepted explanation in the Earth Sciences.
Pangaea's supercontinent cycle is a good example of the efficiency of using the presence or lack of these entities to record the development, tenure, and break-up of supercontinents. There is a sharp decrease in passive margins between 500 and 350 Ma during the timing of Pangaea's assembly.
Continental fragments and microcontinent crustal compositions are very similar to those of regular continental crust.The rifting process that caused the continental fragments to form most likely impacts their layers and overall thickness along with the addition of mafic intrusions to the crust.
This is how throughout the Earth's history there has been the ability to create super continents where all of the land mass has converged into one (for example, Pangaea). Slab suction occurs when a subducting slab drives flow in the lower mantle by exerting additional force down in the direction of the mantle's convection currents.
Pangaea or Pangea (/ p æ n ˈ dʒ iː ə / pan-JEE-ə) [1] was a supercontinent that existed during the late Paleozoic and early Mesozoic eras. [2] It assembled from the earlier continental units of Gondwana , Euramerica and Siberia during the Carboniferous approximately 335 million years ago, and began to break apart about 200 million years ...
According to the extroversion model first developed by Paul F. Hoffman, subduction ceases in the Pacific Ocean Basin. [71] [77] 400–500 million The supercontinent (Pangaea Proxima, Novopangaea, Amasia, or Aurica) will likely have rifted apart. [71] This will likely result in higher global temperatures, similar to the Cretaceous period. [73]
The continental crust on the downgoing plate is deeply subducted as part of the downgoing plate during collision, defined as buoyant crust entering a subduction zone. An unknown proportion of subducted continental crust returns to the surface as ultra-high pressure (UHP) metamorphic terranes, which contain metamorphic coesite and/or diamond plus or minus unusual silicon-rich garnets and/or ...