By sciencebase, Section News Posted on Tue Apr 22, 2008 at 06:42:03 AM PST
Graeme Eagles of the University of London thinks he understands what happened to the supercontinent that existed before the present-day continents between 500m and 180m years ago. Apparently, it split in two because it got too big.
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.
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