![]() As they merge together and then drift apart, the continents will drive volcanic activity that “spews huge amounts of CO 2 up into the atmosphere”, says Farnsworth, and that will heat up the planet. Modelling the climate of the new supercontinent, described on 25 September in Nature Geoscience 2, Alexander Farnsworth at the University of Bristol, UK, and his colleagues found that much of Pangaea Ultima will experience temperatures of higher than 40 ☌, making it uninhabitable to most mammalian life. The next, dubbed Pangaea Ultima, is expected to form at the equator in about 250 million years, as the Atlantic Ocean shrinks and a merged Afro-Eurasian continent crashes into the Americas. The last supercontinent, Pangaea, broke apart about 200 million years ago. “It’s a bit depressing.”Įarth is currently thought to be in the middle of a supercontinent cycle 1 as its present-day continents drift. “It does seem like life is going to have a bit more of a hard time in the future,” says Hannah Davies, a geologist at the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences in Potsdam. The planet’s landmasses are expected to form a supercontinent, driving volcanism and increases to carbon dioxide levels that will leave most of its land barren. Up to 92% of Earth could be uninhabitable to mammals in 250 million years, researchers predict. Credit: Alex Farnsworth and Chirs Scotese ![]() Pangaea Ultima is expected to form in about 250 million years, when a land mass comprising Europe, Asia and Africa merges with the Americas.
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