Overview

Ready to time travel? Here’s what our planet will look like in the future, according to science: all the continents will come back together to form a single vast land mass surrounded by an unfathomable sea. This new supercontinent is called Amasia and will be born within 250 million years, when continental drift joins the west coast of America with the east coast of Asia, putting an end to the existence of the gigantic Pacific Ocean that currently covers a third of the planet. 

The science and other stuff to know

The Theory of Continental Drift maintains that the continents are not static territories rooted in the interior of the planet, but rather are dynamic entities, in constant movement, and with deformable limits. 175 million years ago, the Pangea supercontinent began to disintegrate to give rise to the current geographical distribution; Africa separated from South America and Eurasia from North America.

That drift hasn’t stopped. In fact, a team of researchers used a supercomputer to run a simulation showing how, as America continues to drift away from Africa, it will eventually collide with Asia, giving rise to the supercontinent Amasia, according to the study published in the National Science Review.

A previous study, published in 2012, also suggested the formation of Amasia, indicating that it would end up located at the North Pole. They reached this conclusion thanks to a model that facilitated the study of the magnetic behavior of the earth’s crust. 

So what?

250 million years is a blink of an eye in geological terms. That long ago, dinosaurs already inhabited the Earth along with countless other species of animals and plants. Our species could still be present on Earth when Amasia is formed but would have evolved in ways that are both mysterious and incomprehensible to our minds at this time.

The environment will also have changed radically; there will be huge expanses of arid land in the interior of the supercontinent and the Earth’s climate, temperature and geology will make it a completely unrecognizable place. This is how Zheng-Xiang Li, co-author of the article, considers it. In a press release, he stated that it is fascinating to think what the humans who inhabit Amasia will be like.

What’s next?

The current geophysical models we have to predict the dynamics of tectonic plates, the oceanic lithosphere, or continental crusts still need to be significantly improved in order to be able to provide us with short-term data accurate enough to predict earthquakes and other natural disasters, allowing us to evacuate risk areas and thus saving millions of lives.