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The Arctic Ocean and Caribbean Sea will vanish in the next 200 to 300 million years, and Asia will collide with the Americas to form a new supercontinent named Amasia, according to scientists.
The Pacific Ocean is reportedly receding by almost an inch a year, according to researchers at Curtin University in Australia and Peking University in China. They therefore think that the Americas and Asia will eventually collide to form a new supercontinent called Amasia at some point in the future, perhaps within 200 million to 300 million years, when the Earth’s landmasses would join together.
“Over the past two billion years, Earth’s continents have collided together to form a supercontinent every 600 million years, known as the supercontinent cycle. This means that the current continents are due to come together again in a couple of hundred of million years’ time,” said Dr Chuan Huang, lead author of a study published in the journal National Science Review.
Researchers said that introversion and extroversion are two very different processes thought to have generated Earth’s supercontinents. The Independent reports the study saying, “The latter entails the closure of the prior exterior superocean, whilst the former requires the closure of the interior oceans generated during the break-up of the previous supercontinent.”
The new supercontinent, according to experts, will eventually form on top of the Earth and sag south toward the equator. If this does occur, Antarctica may stay uninhabited at the bottom of the globe.
According to the study, Eurasia and the Americas are moving more slowly toward the Pacific Ocean whereas Australia is already drifting toward Asia at a rate of roughly 7 centimetres each year.
Our world will likely look very different from how it does today as a result of the birth of the new supercontinent, according to the researchers’ findings. “Currently, Earth consists of seven continents with widely different ecosystems and human cultures, so it would be fascinating to think what the world might look like in 200 million to 300 million years’ time,” they said.(WION)
