'Amasia' Could Be Next Supercontinent

(EndPlay Staff Reports) - A group of scientists are predicting that today's continents will crash into each other in hundreds of millions of years, creating a new supercontinent over the North Pole.

That is the prediction of geologists at Yale University who are studying the formation of supercontinents, in which Earth's major continental blocks become one landmass.

Their theory is that the Arctic Ocean and Caribbean Sea will disappear while North and South America become one. This landmass will head northward and collide with Europe and Asia becoming a supercontinent that the geologists are calling "Amasia."

"After those water bodies close, we're on our way to the next supercontinent," Ross Mitchell, the Yale doctoral student who is the paper's first author, said. "You'd have the Americas meeting Eurasia practically at the North Pole."

The study, published in Nature , stated that the last supercontinent formed about 300 million years ago on the equator. That supercontinent, named Pangaea, would have been about where West Africa is now.

The Yale geologists' theory bucks traditional thoughts that the next supercontinent would form near that same spot or on the opposite side of the globe near the equator. Those theories, MSNBC reported, would result in either the Atlantic Ocean or Pacific Ocean closing up.

Mitchell told NPR that continental plates are on the move, but about at "the rate your fingernails grow." While slow, he said, it adds up over hundreds of millions of years.

There have been three and possibly four of these supercontinents over billions of years. Mitchell's projections predict the next one will form 50 million to 200 million years from now.

St. Francis Xavier University's Brandon Murphy, who studies supercontinents, told NPR that the geologists' idea is innovative and plausable, as well as something many haven't thought about.

"And so even if the model is wrong, we will learn a lot by testing it," he said.