Pangaea or Pangea (/pænˈdʒiːə/ pan-JEE-ə) was a supercontinent that existed during the late Paleozoic and early Mesozoic eras. It assembled from the earlier continental units of Gondwana, Euramerica and Siberia during the Carboniferous period approximately 335 million years ago, and began to break apart about 200 million years ago, at the end of the Triassic and beginning of the Jurassic. Pangaea was C-shaped, with the bulk of its mass stretching between Earth's northern and southern polar regions and surrounded by the superocean Panthalassa and the Paleo-Tethys and subsequent Tethys Oceans. Pangaea is the most recent supercontinent to have existed and was the first to be reconstructed by geologists.
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👉 Pangea in the context of Craton
A craton ( /ˈkreɪtɒn/ KRAYT-on, /ˈkrætɒn/ KRAT-on, or /ˈkreɪtən/ KRAY-tən; from Ancient Greek: κράτος kratos "strength") is an old and stable part of continental lithosphere (the Earth's two topmost layers, the crust and the lithospheric mantle). Having often survived cycles of merging and rifting of continents, cratons are generally found in the interiors of tectonic plates; the exceptions occur where geologically recent rifting events have separated cratons and created passive margins along their edges. Cratons are composed of ancient crystalline basement rocks covered by younger sedimentary rocks. They have a thick crust and deep lithospheric roots extending several hundred kilometres into Earth's mantle.
Cratons contain the oldest continental crust rocks on Earth. They were formed in the Archaean (4 to 2.5 billion years ago) and the Proterozoic (2.5 billion- 538.8 million year ago) geologic eons. Most were formed in the Archaean.
In this Dossier
Pangea in the context of Continental collision
In geology, continental collision is a phenomenon of plate tectonics that occurs at convergent boundaries. Continental collision is a variation on the fundamental process of subduction, whereby the subduction zone is destroyed, mountains produced, and two continents sutured together. Continental collision is only known to occur on Earth.
Continental collision is not an instantaneous event, but may take several tens of millions of years before the faulting and folding caused by collisions stops. The collision between India and Asia has been going on for about 50 million years already and shows no signs of abating. Collision between East and West Gondwana to form the East African Orogen took about 100 million years from beginning (610 Ma) to end (510 Ma). The collision between Gondwana and Laurasia to form Pangea occurred in a relatively brief interval, about 50 million years long.
Pangea in the context of Antarctic plate
The Antarctic plate is a tectonic plate containing the continent of Antarctica, the Kerguelen Plateau, and some remote islands in the Southern Ocean and other surrounding oceans. After breakup from Gondwana (the southern part of the supercontinent Pangea), the Antarctic plate began moving the continent of Antarctica south to its present isolated location, causing the continent to develop a much colder climate. The Antarctic plate is bounded almost entirely by extensional mid-ocean ridge systems. The adjoining plates are the Nazca plate, the South American plate, the African plate, the Somali plate, the Indo-Australian plate, the Pacific plate, and, across a transform boundary, the Scotia and South Sandwich plates.
The Antarctic plate has an area of about 60,900,000 km (23,500,000 sq mi). It is Earth's fifth-largest tectonic plate.
Pangea in the context of Avalonia
Avalonia was a microcontinent in the Paleozoic era. Crustal fragments of this former microcontinent are terranes in parts of the eastern coast of North America: Atlantic Canada, and parts of the East Coast of the United States. In addition, terranes derived from Avalonia also make up portions of Northwestern Europe, being found in England, Wales and parts of Ireland.
Avalonia developed as a volcanic arc on the northern margin of Gondwana. It eventually rifted off, becoming a drifting microcontinent. The Rheic Ocean formed behind it, and the Iapetus Ocean shrank in front. It collided with the continents Baltica, then Laurentia.The Armorican Terrane assemblage collided with the merged Baltica/Avalonia during the formation of Pangea. When Pangea broke up, Avalonia's remains were divided by the rift which became the Atlantic Ocean.
Pangea in the context of Karoo Basin
The Karoo Supergroup is the most widespread stratigraphic unit in Africa south of the Kalahari Desert. The supergroup consists of a sequence of units, mostly of nonmarine origin, deposited between the Late Carboniferous and Early Jurassic, a period of about 120 million years.
In southern Africa, rocks of the Karoo Supergroup cover almost two thirds of the present land surface, making part of the 75% of sediments or sedimentary rocks covering the earth including all of Lesotho, almost the whole of Free State, and large parts of the Eastern Cape, Northern Cape, Mpumalanga and KwaZulu-Natal Provinces of South Africa. Karoo supergroup outcrops are also found in Namibia, Eswatini, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Malawi, as well as on other continents that were part of Gondwana. The basins in which it was deposited formed during the formation and breakup of Pangea. The type area of the Karoo Supergroup is the Great Karoo in South Africa, where the most extensive outcrops of the sequence are exposed. Its strata, which consist mostly of shales and sandstones, record an almost continuous sequence of marine glacial to terrestrial deposition from the Late Carboniferous to the Early Jurassic. These accumulated in a retroarc foreland basin called the "main Karoo" Basin. This basin was formed by the subduction and orogenesis along the southern border of what eventually became Southern Africa, in southern Gondwana. Its sediments attain a maximum cumulative thickness of 12 km, with the overlying basaltic lavas (the Drakensberg Group) at least 1.4 km thick.