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Pangea

How did Pangea form....... I know in 1912 when Alfred Wegner first came up with the evidence to support sea floor spreading and plate tectonics theory. But how was it that Pangea came about.......?

Was there just a land mass that started off from the big bang, and then one day the plates decided to move apart...??

OR

Was there volcanic activity which formed the land???/

Nice to know
Thanks
Reply 1
Original post by Winchy
How did Pangea form....... I know in 1912 when Alfred Wegner first came up with the evidence to support sea floor spreading and plate tectonics theory. But how was it that Pangea came about.......?

Was there just a land mass that started off from the big bang, and then one day the plates decided to move apart...??

OR

Was there volcanic activity which formed the land???/

Nice to know
Thanks


Pangea was not the first super-continent, there have been several before it such as Proto-Gondwana, Rodinia and Columbia (evidence for the last two is less definitive). Earth has been going through a cycle of forming huge super-continents and then breaking them apart for at least 2 billion years.

The formation of Pangea itself is from smaller continents colliding through convergent plate tectonics, the ocean between the continents gets closed in a space of millions of years until there is none left and collision occurs forming a huge land mass.

As for the land mass itself, that occurred even earlier during the chemical differentiation of the earth to form a core and a mantle and later on; the crust, this all occurred in the first 100 million years of the formation of the planet.
Reply 2
I'm really sorry for saying this, but honestly, what did you think people on here were going to tell you? Only stuff they've read on Wikipedia or heard from a teacher probably. In this case, I would probably just advise you to read the Wikipedia page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pangaea

I really don't want to be rude, but seriously I really don't understand why people feel the need to ask on an internet forum questions that could easily be answered by skim reading a webpage.
Reply 3
Original post by 117r
I'm really sorry for saying this, but honestly, what did you think people on here were going to tell you? Only stuff they've read on Wikipedia or heard from a teacher probably. In this case, I would probably just advise you to read the Wikipedia page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pangaea

I really don't want to be rude, but seriously I really don't understand why people feel the need to ask on an internet forum questions that could easily be answered by skim reading a webpage.


I really dont want to be rude but f**k you
Original post by Winchy
I really dont want to be rude but f**k you


Lol.

Pangea came about when all the continents collided with one another (I say collided, but the land basically rose out of the ocean when the plates came together). The premise is that the Earth is a sphere so everything must eventually break apart and come together (but not really breaking apart in the first place, if you know what I mean, it's all rock recycling). I personally find it hard to believe that pangea was the ONLY land mass on the world though, it seems quite unlikely that the rest would all be ocean.
(edited 11 years ago)

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