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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 ...
He proposed that the continents had once formed a single landmass, called Pangaea, before breaking apart and drifting to their present locations. [32] Wegener was the first to use the phrase "continental drift" (1912, 1915) [5] [18] (German: "die Verschiebung der Kontinente") and to publish the hypothesis that the continents had somehow ...
In 1915, in the first edition of his book, Die Entstehung der Kontinente und Ozeane, written in German, [22] Wegener drew together evidence from various fields to advance the theory that there had once been a giant continent, which he named "Urkontinent " [23] (German for "primal continent", analogous to the Greek "Pangaea", [24] meaning "All ...
There are seven continents in our world today. But 250 million years ago, those continents may have been one giant supercontinent called, Pangaea. How did it break up into the world we know today ...
The name Pangaea/Pangea is derived from Ancient Greek pan (πᾶν, "all, entire, whole") and Gaia (Γαῖα, "Mother Earth, land"). [ 28 ] [ 33 ] The word was allegedly coined by German meteorologist Alfred L. Wegener [ 34 ] in 1915.
In 1915, German meteorologist Alfred Wegener proposed the existence of a supercontinent that he called Pangaea. In 1937, South African geologist Alexander du Toit proposed that Pangaea was divided into two larger landmasses, Laurasia in the Northern Hemisphere and Gondwana in the Southern Hemisphere, separated by the Tethys Ocean. [5]
The Phanerozoic supercontinent Pangaea began to break up 215 Ma and this distancing continues today. Because Pangaea is the most recent of Earth's supercontinents, it is the best known and understood.
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]