How long have the continents been moving

Carmen Ang Reporter, Visual Capitalist. Take action on UpLink. Forum in focus. The one essential element needed to accelerate action on climate change. Read more about this project. Explore context. Explore the latest strategic trends, research and analysis. The video below shows how this happened over one billion years.

The emergence of plate tectonic theory. Have you read? Kenorland : 2. Rodinia : — million years ago. Pannotia : million years ago. Pangea : million years ago. Pangea was just one of several supercontinents to mass together and break apart over the course of geological history. The importance of plate tectonics. Saving the planet What is the World Economic Forum doing around the issue of deep-sea mining? License and Republishing. Written by. More on Science View all.

Is cellular agriculture the climate-friendly answer to growing food demands? Watch an exciting display of tectonic shift and how the Earth took its current shape at Maropeng. Return to the Exhibition Guide. It took millions of years for continents to drift apart to where they are now. It took hundreds of millions of years for the first land masses to emerge. Source: Futurism. It was formed by collisions of particles in a large cloud of material.

Slowly gravity gathered together all these particles of dust and gas and formed larger clumps. These clumps continued to collide and gradually grew bigger and bigger eventually forming the Earth. The earth at this time was very different to how we know it today. Earth's Tectonic History In the last section we looked at plate tectonics and the movement of the large plates that make up the Earth's crust.

Here we will look at how plate tectonics has changed the face of the earth over the last few billion years and how it is continuing to change.

The idea of continental drift was the forerunner of the theory of plate tectonics. Plate tectonics is thought of as the unifying theory as all of geology can be explained using it. By looking at the globe, we can see that the east coast of South America seems to fit perfectly, almost like a puzzle, into the west coast of Africa. We can also see that North America can be rotated slightly and made to fit comfortably next to Europe, and Asia. Take a look at a map and see if you can see this.

This is evidence that at one point all of these continents were once joined up. This giant landmass known as a supercontinent was called Pangea. The word Pangaea means "All Lands", this describes the way all the continents were joined up together. Pangea existed million years ago and about millions years ago it began to break apart. Over millions of years these pieces came to be the continents as we know them today. Pangaea was not the first supercontinent and it will not be the last.