Earth has changed a lot during its long 4.5 billion-year life, experiencing all kinds of continental configurations, including when nearly all the land on the planet formed a giant supercontinent. This could be our future. The Pacific Ocean is dying: it is shrinking by about three centimeters every year. And scientists point out that, thanks to various calculations, a new “supercontinent” will gradually emerge as a result of this process.

The name of the new continent: Amasia.

Study. Researchers led by geologist Chuan Huang at Curtin University in Australia simulated Earth’s future with a supercomputer, and they were stunned by what they visualized. Results, Published in the National Science Reviewsuggests that a new supercontinent would form when the Pacific Ocean disappeared in about 200 million years, causing North America to crash into Asia. The piece of land that will be formed will be very large.

pacific’s death. This vast ocean is actually the remnant of the Panthalassa super-ocean that began to form 700 million years ago. It’s our oldest ocean on Earth, and it’s been shrinking since the time of the dinosaurs. What characterizes it is that it hosts multiple subduction zones, i.e. where tectonic plates collide and sit on top of each other. Popularly known as the “ring of fire”, these structures function almost like channels that go to the bottom of the ocean.

Each year, a few centimeters of the Pacific plate slide between the Eurasian plate and the Indo-Australian plate, reducing the distance between North America, Asia and Australia.

What is Amasya? A new supercontinent. The word itself is a portmanteau of the Americas and Asia, and has been debated by the scientific community for more than a decade, but questions remain as to whether it constitutes an “inside-in”, a process known as introversion, or an “outside” process. outside in. “In” is called extroversion. The first refers to the closure of the oceans after Pangea, such as the Indian or the Atlantic, and the second to the closure of the Pacific Ocean.

This new study bets on the second theory: that the oceanic crust of “young” oceans like the Atlantic or Indian, 100 million years old, is less likely to enter the Earth’s mantle compared to older oceans like the Peaceful. .

An ever-changing planet. The world changes throughout life. It has taken different forms over 4,500 million years. We currently live on the fragmented remains of the supercontinent Pangea, which formed 335 million years ago and broke apart during the rise of the dinosaurs. In fact, the existence of older supercontinents such as Rodinia and Columbia suggests that Earth was trapped in a “supercontinent cycle” in which these massive landmasses were formed and destroyed every 600 million years.

Other hypotheses. And this is the latest in a long series of supercontinent simulations, all trying to predict what our planet will look like in the future. In one possible scenario, a supercontinent called Novopangea forms, the Americas collide with Antarctica before colliding with Eurasia and Africa. In another scenario, Aurica forms: both the Pacific and Atlantic oceans close and a new ocean basin emerges in its place.

This new theory, unlike other theories, proposes that when Amasya formed, the Pacific Ocean, not the Atlantic Ocean or the Caribbean Sea, would have disappeared. Whatever the outcome, the Earth and its oceans will never be the same again. A reminder that humans live very little on this planet. And the Earth as we know it will be completely different in the future. But of course we will not see that.