#Supercontinent illus?
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Studying early origins of the planet with our 7th grader. Anyone know of any
good downloadable illustrations of the original supercontinent? (Couldn't find
anything in the libraries here.) Better yet, an animated bit or sequential
pictures that we could display on the computer?
Also, curious about differences between "Gondwanaland" and "Pangea." The
Groliers-Online articles don't really make the differences clear, except that
Gond. refers only to the southern continents. Were these just
differently-evolved "theory" names, essentially referring more or less to the
same geologic event, or separate stages of the continents' breakup or…?
Don/Chicago
Hi, Don–
I believe Gondwanaland was the first theorized supercontinent, back when
"continental drift" was first being figured out. Now we speak of "plate
tectonics" (which includes continental drift and more). In current
terminonlogy, Pangaea is the land mass that held all of today's continents in
one supercontinent. When it started to break up maybe 180 million years ago,
it first split into two, Laurasia and Gondwana. By 40 million years later
Gondwana had split into Australia, Antarctica, Africa, India and South America,
while Laurasia had broken into Eurasia and North America.
It seems Pangaea is not the first supercontinent – the continents may have
assembled into one supercontinent and broken apart repeatedly over billions of
years since they formed.
See my remarks about plate tectonic mapping software in the "Ancient
coastlines" topic in this section, and any other answers that appear there,
since the subjects are similar.
–Doug