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Because the formation of Gondwana encompassed several continents and extended from the Neoproterozoic to the early Palaeozoic, Pan-African could no longer be considered a single orogeny, [4] but rather an orogenic cycle that included the opening and closing of several large oceans and the collisions of several continental blocks.
Gondwana (/ ɡ ɒ n d ˈ w ɑː n ə /) [1] was a large landmass, sometimes referred to as a supercontinent. The remnants of Gondwana make up around two-thirds of today's continental area, including South America, Africa, Antarctica, Australia, Zealandia, Arabia, and the Indian subcontinent.
The notion that Gondwana was assembled during the Late Precambrian from two older fragments along the Pan-African Mozambique Belt was first proposed in the early 1980s. [3] A decade later this continental collision was named the East African Orogeny, but it was also realised that this was not the simple bringing together of two halves.
Pannotia was centred on the South Pole, hence its name. Pannotia (from Greek: pan-, "all", -nótos, "south"; meaning "all southern land"), also known as the Vendian supercontinent, Greater Gondwana, and the Pan-African supercontinent, was a relatively short-lived Neoproterozoic supercontinent that formed at the end of the Precambrian during the Pan-African orogeny (650–500 Ma), during the ...
The geology of Ethiopia includes rocks of the Neoproterozoic East African Orogeny, Jurassic marine sediments and Quaternary rift-related volcanism. Events that greatly shaped Ethiopian geology is the assembly and break-up of Gondwana and the present-day rifting of Africa.
The extreme cooling of the global climate around 717–635 Ma (the so-called Snowball Earth of the Cryogenian period) and the rapid evolution of primitive life during the subsequent Ediacaran and Cambrian periods are thought to have been triggered by the breaking up of Rodinia or to a slowing down of tectonic processes. [8]
The history of East Africa has been divided into its prehistory, the major polities flourishing, the colonial period, and the post-colonial period, in which the current nations were formed. East Africa is the eastern region of Africa, bordered by North Africa, Central Africa, Southern Africa, the Indian Ocean, and the Sahara Desert. Colonial ...
The oldest Precambrian rocks in Nigeria likely formed during the Archean or the Paleoproterozoic, forming the Beninian gneiss, in the Benin-Nigeria Orogen, formed during the Proterozoic Pan-African orogeny. The crystalline basement rock of the country is grouped as the Nigerian Province, a southern continuation of the central Hoggar reactivated ...