What do you think living in the world would be like today if Pangea were still intact?
I dont think there would be as much biological diversity. Places like Australia have such radically different plants and animals because they were isolated and allowed to develop on their own little tangent. On the other hand, there would not be as many infectious diseases because we would be exposed (and eventully somewhat immune) to everything that anyone gets.
Earth… desert planet
Clouds form by evaporation of ocean water. By the time they reaced the center of the continent, they would have rained themselves out. Therefore, you’d have a fertile coast surrounding an arid core.
You are assuming there would be no lakes or rivers.
I am with Al on this. A perpetual thermal low in the center of the continent, the wind always blowing onshore. If I recall correctly, there were coastal mountains around most of the perimeter (but that was a long time ago and I might be mixing it up with some other supercontinent.)
beachfront property would be worth a lot more!
Did you see Waterworld? The Pangean world is a lot different if you are on one of the “leftover” bits.
One of the problems with speculations is we try to imagine the grand stuff and forget the mundane.
For example, if people “channel” past lives, it’s always as Cleopatra or someone famous, but most past lives must have been Chinese peasants that never left the remote villiage.
You have to keep in mind that there have to be a whole lot of changes besides the great big old whompin’ land mass. You have no Himalayas, no Rockies, No Andes. You can’t have them unless tectonics is an active process. If Pangea still exists, those mountains don’t. The older mountain ranges (Which were formed when the prior supercontinent broke up and reformed into Pangea) would be very thoroughly eroded by now. (Think Appalachia, versus Alps.)
That changes a whole lot of things, not just wind patterns. You get vastly different chemical processes without weathering of crustal rock into the hydrosphere. Oxygen, Carbon, and Nitrogen cycles for the oceans change a whole lot. Probably no ice ages at all. Might be extremely hot in much of Pangea. Might also be very different if Pangea is non-equatorial in placement on the lithosphere. Rotational instability could change the very nature of the climatic forces.
The interior areas of continents are always more arid, and subject to greater extremes of temperatures. More lakes can’t change that, because lakes come from rainfall, not vice versa. So, you pretty much have to have one very large desert in the middle. A different order of magnitude of large, in all likelihood. Say, about thirty percent of the entire landmass. The portions of shoreline on the leeward end of the continent are probably fairly dry, as well, where the major wind patterns are primarily directed out from the continent. Daily on-shore/off-shore cycles will moderate that for a few hundred miles inland, but not much more.
Tris
Not true, and there’s a counterexample: Pangaea itself, where there were large shallow inland seas. Those seas were not just remnant ocean basins, nor developing ocean basins.
Also, mountains could still be built by volcanic action–which is not necessarily a result of subducting tectonic plates.
Um…what?
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*Originally posted by RM Mentock *
Not true, and there’s a counterexample: Pangaea itself, where there were large shallow inland seas. Those seas were not just remnant ocean basins, nor developing ocean basins.
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Well, I suppose inland seas are part of a continent. I would have described them as part of the sea, but what the heck. A land mass the size of Pangea has room for inland seas and lots of desert too.
You get mountains from volcanic extrusion, yes. You don’t get the Himalayas, or the Rockies, or the Andes. Huge chains of mountains covering appreciable portions of continents are very different in both methods of formation, and consequent effect on the earth’s environment.
Tris
If all the Earth’s landmasses were still agglomerated together into one huge supercontinent, we would no longer have any intercontinental ballistic missiles.
Yes but knowing human nature, we would have a shit load of Intra-Continental Ballistic Missles
I have a hypothetical map of Pagaea (II) from the late Permian. There is a range of mountains running along the (south?) coast of Pangaea from what will one day be India, thru eastern Australia, sout Africa and thru central South America. On the other side of Pangaea, there are mountains in what will one day be east Asia. Even if there was one continent and all of the internal collision ranges had worn down, you could still have subduction along the coast driven by oceanic rifts and causing coastal Andean style mountains.
The interior of the continent was mostly swamps in the Carboniferous changing to desert red beds in the Permian (along with a glacial period).
RL, I enjoyed your geologic puns on another thread. Anything I could have added would have sounded siliceous so I decided not to be intrusive. Isn’t there a theory that large continents interfere with the heat exchange of core and mantle and eventually a hot spot/zone will form a rift to break them up. So wouldn’t the first indication of any rifting be a wide scale uplift as volcanic activity concentrated under the continent? I am thinking of the elevated East Africa Rift Zone and the elevated area to the east that poured so much sediment into the Appalachian trough just before the Atlantic opened. If that is the case, you probably would have had a large elevated central area in late Pangaea.