This Is What Earth Will Look Like in 100,000,000 AD

[n2doc]

by Paul Raeburn

Earth’s modern continents are the fragments of a single, 300-million-year-old supercontinent called Pangaea. This vast landmass once rested on the equator, near where Africa is today. During the age of dinosaurs, tectonic forces slowly tore Pangaea apart. Now geologists predict those same forces will reassemble the pieces into a new supercontinent, named Amasia, about 100 million years in the future.

Ancient rocks and mountain ranges show that the constant movement of Earth’s crust has assembled and ripped apart supercontinents several times before, in a roughly half-billion-year cycle. But pinpointing where the past ones formed has proven difficult, which in turn clouded attempts to forecast the next great smashup.

A team of Yale geologists say they have cracked the problem, providing the best look yet at the planet of a.d. 100,000,000. Led by graduate student Ross Mitchell, the researchers first looked back beyond Pangaea and determined the location of supercontinents Rodinia, which formed about a billion years earlier, and Nuna, 700 million years before that. The team found that during the last two cycles, each supercontinent formed a quarter of the way around the globe from where the previous supercontinent had been. Using that insight, they calculated that Amasia will form over the North Pole.

more
http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jul-aug/06-earth-look-like-this-in-100-000-000-ad

[NYC_SKP]

1. I guess my extensive collection of maps and globes...

...will be utterly useless to me by then.

[JohnnyRingo]

2. Not to The Amasian Pickers.

They'll teleport in and offer good money for such antique charts.
Don't throw away those Furbys yet either.

[NYC_SKP]

3. LOL!

[Swede]

4. Palin wil be able to see Russia from her porch.

nt

[eppur_se_muova]

5. So, that southern border fence will just be money wasted ?

Who knew ?

[benld74]

6. There goes my Key Largo dream house,,,,,

[tclambert]

7. Nuh-nuh-nuh-no. By A.D 100,000,000 the runaway greenhouse effect will boil off the oceans.

The whole surface of the Earth will be a dry desert. It won't be quite as hot as Venus, but you won't be able to grow any strawberries.

[glinda]

8. U R right

[AverageJoe90]

9. I don't think so.

Yeah, I know things are pretty bad now and almost certainly going to get notably worse over this next century, but the oceans aren't going to boil away, and neither will humanity go extinct, barring some combination of a couple of truly cataclysmic disasters.

[jsr]

10. Thought boil-off wouldn't happen until 3+ billion years