A geophysicist in the US has created a computer model that appears to answer one of the fundamental questions of plate tectonics: what forces caused Pangaea, the Earth's original single supercontinent, to break up into today's continents.
Pangaea began to split apart roughly 180 million years ago. 'Neither the existence of Pangaea nor the fact that our continental plates are moving has been in dispute for more than 20 years,' says John Baumgardner of Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. 'But this is the first three-dimensional model that begins from a small set of basic principles and accounts for the main features of this geophysical drama.'
The basic energy source driving large-scale geological changes is heat: the immense reservoir of thermal energy in the Earth's interior, augmented by the decay of radioactive elements, induces convection currents in the mantle-the 3000-kilometre-thick layer of silicate rock between the core and the ...
To continue reading this article, subscribe to receive access to all of newscientist.com, including 20 years of archive content.