A long time ago, all the continents were concentrated in one land called Pangea. Pangea broke apart about 200 million years ago, and its fragments drifted across the tectonic plates, but not forever. The continents will reunite again in the distant future. The new study, which will be presented on Dec. 8 at an online poster session at the American Geophysical Union meeting, suggests that the future location of the supercontinent could greatly affect Earth’s habitability and climate stability. These discoveries are also important for the search for life on other planets.
       The study submitted for publication is the first to model the climate of a distant future supercontinent.
        Scientists are not sure what the next supercontinent will look like or where it will be located. One possibility is that in 200 million years, all continents except Antarctica could join near the North Pole to form the supercontinent Armenia. Another possibility is that “Aurica” ​​could have formed from all the continents that converged around the equator over a period of about 250 million years.
        How the lands of the supercontinent Aurika (above) and Amasia are distributed. Future landforms are shown in grey, for comparison with current continental outlines. Image credit: Way et al. 2020
        In the new study, the researchers used a 3D global climate model to model how these two land configurations would affect the global climate system. The study was led by Michael Way, a physicist at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, part of Columbia University’s Earth Institute.
        The team found that Amasya and Aurika influence climate differently by altering atmospheric and oceanic circulation. If all the continents were clustered around the equator in the Aurica scenario, the Earth could end up warming by 3°C.
        In the Amasya scenario, the lack of land between the poles would disrupt the ocean’s conveyor belt, which currently transports heat from the equator to the poles due to the accumulation of land around the poles. As a result, the poles will be colder and covered in ice all year round. All this ice reflects heat back into space.
        With Amasya, “more snow falls,” Way explained. “You have ice sheets and you get very effective ice albedo feedback that tends to cool the planet.”
       In addition to cooler temperatures, Way said sea levels could be lower in the Amasya scenario, more water would be trapped in ice sheets, and snowy conditions could mean there isn’t much land to grow crops.
        Ourika, on the other hand, may be more beach-oriented, he says. Earth closer to the equator would absorb stronger sunlight there, and there would be no polar ice caps reflecting heat back from the Earth’s atmosphere, so global temperatures would be higher.
        While Way compares Aurica’s coastline to Brazil’s paradise beaches, “it can get very dry inland,” he warns. Whether much of the land is suitable for agriculture will depend on the distribution of the lakes and the types of rainfall they receive—details not covered in this article, but which may be explored in the future.
        Distribution of snow and ice in winter and summer in Aurika (left) and Amasya. Image credit: Way et al. 2020
        Modeling shows that about 60 percent of the Amazon area is ideal for liquid water, compared to 99.8 percent of the Orica area – a discovery that could help in the search for life on other planets. One of the main factors that astronomers look at when searching for potentially habitable worlds is whether liquid water can survive on the planet’s surface. When modeling these other worlds, they tend to simulate planets that are completely covered by oceans or have a topography similar to the present-day Earth. However, a new study shows that it’s important to consider land location when assessing whether temperatures fall in the “habitable” zone between freezing and boiling.
        While it may take scientists a decade or more to determine the actual distribution of land and oceans on planets in other star systems, the researchers hope to have a large library of land and ocean data for climate modeling that can help estimate potential habitability. planets. neighboring worlds.
       Hannah Davies and Joao Duarte of the University of Lisbon and Mattias Greene of Bangor University in Wales are co-authors of the study.
        Hello Sarah. Gold again. Oh, what the climate will look like when the earth shifts again and old ocean basins close and new ones open. This has to change because I believe the winds and ocean currents will change, plus the geological structures will realign. The North American Plate is moving rapidly to the southwest. The first African plate bulldozed Europe, so there were several earthquakes in Turkey, Greece and Italy. It will be interesting to see which direction the British Isles go (Ireland originates from the South Pacific in the ocean region. Of course the 90E seismic zone is very active and the Indo-Australian Plate is indeed moving towards India.