Rodinia

That's just the most recent one.

Yeah, before that there was Panotia and potentially Rodinia and then Columbia slash Nunia, Kenorland and Ur and Valabara, which goes back to up to over three billion years ago.

How recently were these named? Like, I mean, when was the Pangea

theory? It's

In some regions, glaciers extended to the equator, As the Earth's atmosphere changed, the continents moved.

They separated and regrouped, forming Rodinia, a new supercontinent.

And this one was super.

Maybe it was the biggest in history.

And what about life? Well, it finally got more complex.

And then something else happened.

Rodinia fractured and another supercontinent appeared, known as Panotia.

Then, about 540 or 485 million years ago, a new life explosion occurred.

How did this deep freeze start, and how did it end? We think it went like this.

At the time, all of Earth's land was held in one large continent called Rodinia.

As it began to break up, huge areas eroded, pulling carbon dioxide from the air and sequestering it in minerals.

With CO2 dropping, the atmosphere cooled and ice began forming in the polar oceans.

The average surface temperature dropped to negative sixty degrees Fahrenheit.

But beneath the ice, in what some believe to be the birth of plate tectonics, Earth was stirring.

Rodinia kept pulling apart.

Volcanoes formed along its rift zones and began pumping out carbon dioxide and water vapor.

So like a large fissure, a big crater.

crack in the continent that was bringing oceans and oceans and oceans of magma to the surface.

So if you think more like Iceland today or Hawaii, where you have sort of a crack in the earth and the lava is coming to the surface.

But in this instance, just the volume of lava was incredible in comparison.

it solidified so you have this really really cool ophitic texture these columnar joints it's clearly like a topographic high of the region and now it's covered in vegetation so it's not it's not something like you would see in Hawaii where it's you know these these ropey pahoehoe flows that are sort of flowing down the mountain it's it's a little bit more mysterious and something that takes a few minutes to to figure out and so

Erica, what caused the volcanic ridge to form?

If we go back in time... go in our time machine, go back to 1.1 billion years, we punch it in, we would be on the continent Rodinia.

Of course, there was nobody there to call it Rodinia.

Still, geologists have found evidence for older arrangements through matching mountain belts, mineral ages, paleomagnetic signals, and ancient rock provinces.

Names such as Rodinia and Columbia belong to those earlier chapters.

They remind us that Pangaea was not a singular miracle.

It was one expression of a repeating planetary behavior.

Knowing that earlier supercontinents existed makes Earth feel even more dynamic.

The planet has been rearranging itself since long before familiar animals, forests, or modern oceans appeared.

Rodinia came together long before Pangea ever existed.

Before the famous supercontinent, Earth had already practiced the art of gathering its lands into one immense assembly.

One possibility is that powerful glaciers eroded the landscape during a period when Earth's surface was totally frozen.

Another theory proposes that when a past supercontinent called Rodinia began to break apart, the land shot upward and erosion wiped away a billion years of evidence.

Kind of like a giant etch-a-sketch.

And still others theorize that what looks like one global event actually took place over multiple periods of massive erosion or little sediment deposition.