Novopangaea

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title: "Novopangaea" type: doc version: 1 created: 2026-02-28 author: "Wikipedia contributors" status: active scope: public tags: ["future-supercontinents"] description: "Possible future supercontinent" topic_path: "geography" source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novopangaea" license: "CC BY-SA 4.0" wikipedia_page_id: 0 wikipedia_revision_id: 0

::summary Possible future supercontinent ::

::figure[src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6c/Image_200.00my_(Novopangea).jpg" caption="date=March 2023}}" alt="Novopangea"] ::

Novopangaea or Novopangea (Greco-Latin for "New Pangaea") is a possible future supercontinent postulated by Roy Livermore in the late 1990s. It assumes closure of the Pacific, docking of Australia with East Asia and North America, and northward motion of Antarctica.

Alternative scenarios

Paleogeologist Ronald Blakey has described the next 15 to 100 million years of tectonic development as fairly settled and predictable but no supercontinent will form in that time frame. Beyond that, he cautions that the geologic record is full of unexpected shifts in tectonic activity that make further projections "very, very speculative". In addition to Novopangaea, two other hypothetical supercontinents—"Amasia" and Christopher Scotese's "Pangaea Ultima"—were illustrated in an October 2007 New Scientist article. Another supercontinent prediction, Aurica, has been proposed in more recent times, suggesting the closures of both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.

Research by Masaki Yoshida and Madhava Santosh in August 2011 suggests that due to the presence of relatively hot large low-shear-velocity provinces below Africa and the Pacific preventing convergent plate tectonics, South America might not be able to cross the Pacific as suggested by the Novopangaea model, rather staying close to its current position relative to North America, and Antarctica may not be able to leave the South Pole as suggested. Therefore, they suggest that while Eurasia, Africa, Australia, and North America may merge as suggested, South America and Antarctica will remain separate from the resultant supercontinent by an only partially closed Pacific Ocean.

References

References

1. Wilkins, Alasdair. (27 January 2011). "A history of supercontinents on planet Earth".
2. (23 September 2013). "What Did the Continents Look Like Millions of Years Ago?".
3. (20 October 2007). "Pangaea, the comeback". New Scientist.
4. Yoshida, Masaki. (October 2011). "Future supercontinent assembled in the northern hemisphere". Terra Nova.
5. Yirka, Bob. (20 September 2011). "Japanese scientists say giant plumes will prevent new Pangaea".

::callout[type=info title="Wikipedia Source"] This article was imported from Wikipedia and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Content has been adapted to SurfDoc format. Original contributors can be found on the article history page. ::