They said that billions of years ago there was a huge land called Pangaea wat caused the Pangaea to breakaway?

Answer 1

Rifting and break-up of Pangaea

Pangaea separation animationThere were three major phases in the break-up of Pangaea. The first phase began in the Early-Middle Jurassic, when Pangaea created a rift from the Tethys Ocean from the east and the Pacific from the west. The rifting took place between North America and Africa, the rift produced multiple failed rifts. The rift resulted in a new ocean, the Atlantic Ocean.

The Atlantic Ocean did not open uniformly; rifting began in the North-Central Atlantic. The South Atlantic did not open until the Cretaceous. Laurasia started to rotate clockwise and moved northward with North America to the north, and Eurasia to the south. The clockwise motion of Laurasia also led to the closing of the Tethys Ocean. Meanwhile, in the other side of Africa, new rifts were also forming along the adjacent margins of east Africa, Antarctica, and Madagascar that would lead to the formation of the Southwest Indian Ocean that would also open up in the Cretaceous.

The second, major phase in the break-up of Pangaea began in the Early Cretaceous (150-140 million years ago), when the minor supercontinent of Gondwana separated into four multiple continents (Africa, South America, India and Antarctica/Australia). About 200 million years ago, the continent of Cimmeria, as mentioned above ("The Formation of Pangaea"), collided with Eurasia. However, a subduction zone was forming, as soon as Cimmeria collided.

This subduction zone was called the Tethyan Trench. This trench might have subducted what is called the Tethyan mid-ocean ridge, a ridge responsible for Tethys Ocean's expansion. It probably caused Africa, India and Australia to move northward. In the Early Cretaceous, Atlantica, today's South America and Africa, finally separated from Eastern Gondwana (Antarctica, India, and Australia), causing the opening of a "South Indian Ocean". In the middle Cretaceous, Gondwana fragmented to open up the South Atlantic Ocean as South America started to move westward away from Africa. The South Atlantic did not develop uniformly, rather it rifted from south to north.

Also, at the same time Madagascar and India began to separate from Antarctica and moved northward, opening up the Indian Ocean. Madagascar and India separated from each other 100 - 90 million years ago in the Late Cretaceous. India continued to move northward toward Eurasia at 15 centimeters per year (a plate tectonic record), closing the Tethys Ocean, while Madagascar stopped and became locked to the African Plate. New Zealand and New Caledonia began to move from Australia in an eastward direction towards the Pacific, opening the Coral Sea and Tasman Sea. They have been independent islands since.

The third major and final phase of the break-up of Pangaea occurred in the early Cenozoic (Paleocene - Oligocene). North America/Greenland broke free from Eurasia, opening the Norwegian Sea about 60-55 million years ago. The Atlantic and Indian Oceans continued to expand, closing the Tethys Ocean.

Meanwhile, Australia split from Antarctica and moved rapidly northward, just as India did more than 40 million years earlier, and is on a collision course with Eastern Asia. Both Australia and India are currently moving in a northeast direction at 5-6 cm/year. Antarctica has been near or at the South Pole since the formation of Pangaea (since about 280 Ma). India started to collide with Asia beginning about 35 million years ago, forming the Himalayan orogeny, and also finally closing the Tethys Seaway; this collision continues today. The African Plate started to change directions, from west to northwest toward Europe, and South America began to move in a northward direction separating it from Antarctica, allowing complete oceanic circulation around Antarctica for the first time, causing a rapid cooling of the continent and allowing glaciers to form. Other major events took place during the Cenozoic, including the opening of the Gulf of California, the uplift of the Alps, and the opening of the Sea of Japan. The break-up of Pangaea continues today in the East Africa Rift; ongoing collisions may indicate the incipient creation of a new supercontinent.

Answer 2

It wasn't that long ago -- it was more like a hundred million years ago. The currents in the molten rock far below the earth's surface move the continents around, as well as moving things up and down. This motion is visible today; the Americas are separating from Europe and Africa by an inch or so a year. New seabed is being created in the middle of the Atlantic to fill the gap. The seabed traps the earth's magnetism as it cools below the Curie temperature, and gives a record of the reversal of the earth's magnetic field over the millenia.
Postscript: Previous answer is thorough, and technically accurate.

Answer 3

Pangaea was around during the Permian Period, about 200 million years ago. It started breaking up because the Earth is a dynamic system, with supercontinents forming and breaking apart of regular intervals. If I remember correctly, the supercontinent Rhodina was around at the end of the Proterozoic Eon, some 600 million years ago. The Wilson Cycle first explained this process.

Answer 4

Tectonic movements of the earths crustal plates (including continental drift).

Answer 5

Tectonic plates shifting by thermal activity in the mantle.

Answer 6

The other lands heard you were coming...


or Continental drift as the earth cools and changes

Answer 7

tectonic plates shifting.

Answer 8

it the simplest way: continent drift ;
Continental drift refers to the movement of the Earth's continents relative to each other.

Frank Bursley Taylor had proposed the concept in a Geological Society of America meeting in 1908 and published his work in the GSA Bulletin in June 1910.[1] Abraham Ortelius, Francis Bacon, Antonio Snider-Pellegrini, Benjamin Franklin, and others had noted earlier that the shapes of continents on either side of the Atlantic Ocean (most notably, Africa and South America) seem to fit together. The similarity of southern continent fossil faunae and some geological formations had led a small number of Southern hemisphere geologists to conjecture as early as 1900[citation needed] that all the continents had once been joined into a supercontinent (now known as Pangaea). Frank Bursley Taylor suggested that the continents were dragged towards the equator by increased lunar gravity during the Cretaceous, thus forming the Himalaya and Alps on the southern faces.

Alfred Wegener was the first to use the phrase "continental drift" (in German "die Verschiebung der Kontinente") and formally publish the hypothesis that the continents had somehow "drifted" apart. However, he was unable to provide a convincing explanation for the physical processes which might have caused this drift. His suggestion that the continents had been pulled apart by the centrifugal pseudoforce of the Earth's rotation was considered unrealistic by the scientific community.[2]

The hypothesis received support through the controversial years from South African geologist Alexander Du Toit as well as from Arthur Holmes. The idea of continental drift did not become widely accepted even as theory until the late 1950s. By the 1960s, geological research conducted by Robert S. Dietz, Bruce Heezen, and Harry Hess, along with a rekindling of the theory including a mechanism by J. Tuzo Wilson led to widespread acceptance of the theory among geologists.

The hypothesis of continental drift became part of the larger theory of plate tectonics. This article deals mainly with the historical development of the continental drift hypothesis before 1950 . See plate tectonics for information on current ideas underlying concepts of continental drift
For more details on this topic, see Plate tectonics.
Note: This section contains evidence available to Wegener's contemporaries and predecessors


Fossil patterns across continents.
Pangaea separation animationThe notion that continents have not always been at their present positions was suggested as early as 1596 by the Dutch map maker Abraham Ortelius in the third edition of his work Thesaurus Geographicus. Ortelius suggested that the Americas, Eurasia and Africa were once joined and have since drifted apart "by earthquakes and floods", creating the modern Atlantic Ocean. For evidence, he wrote: "The vestiges of the rupture reveal themselves, if someone brings forward a map of the world and considers carefully the coasts of the three continents." Francis Bacon commented on Ortelius' idea in 1620, as did Benjamin Franklin and Alexander von Humboldt in later centuries.

Evidence for continental drift is now extensive, in the form of plant and animal fossils of the same age found around different continent shores, suggesting that these shores were once joined: the fossils of the freshwater crocodile, found in Brazil and South Africa, are one example. Another is the discovery of fossils of the aquatic reptile Lystrosaurus from rocks of the same age from locations in South America, Africa, and Antarctica. There is also living evidence - the same animals being found on two continents. An example of this is a particular earthworm found in South America and South Africa.

The complementary arrangement of the facing sides of South America and Africa is obvious, but is a temporary coincidence. In millions of years, seafloor spreading, continental drift, and other forces of tectonophysics will further separate and rotate those two continents. It was this temporary feature which inspired Alfred Wegener to study what he defined as continental drift. He never lived to see his hypothesis be proved true.

Widespread distribution of Permo-Carboniferous glacial sediments in South America, Africa, Madagascar, Arabia, India, Antarctica and Australia was one of the major pieces of evidence for the theory of continental drift. The continuity of glaciers, inferred from oriented glacial striations and deposits called tillites, suggested the existence of the supercontinent of Gondwana, which became a central element of the concept of continental drift. Striations indicated glacial flow away from the equator and toward the poles, in modern coordinates, and was a good indicator of the fact that the southern continents had previously been in dramatically different locations, as well as contiguous with each other.


[edit] Debate
Before geophysical evidence started accumulating after World War II, the idea of continental drift caused sharp disagreement among geologists. Wegener had introduced his theory in 1912 at a meeting of the German Geological Association. His paper was published that year and expanded into a book in 1915. In 1921 the Berlin Geological Society held a symposium on the theory. In 1922 Wegener's book was translated into English and then it received a wider audience. In 1923 the theory was discussed at conferences by Geological Society of France, the Geological Section of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Royal Geological Society. The theory was carefully but critically reviewed in the journal Nature by Philip Lake. On November 15, 1926, the American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG) held a symposium at which the continental drift hypothesis was vigorously debated. The resulting papers were published in 1928 under the title Theory of continental drift. Wegener himself contributed a paper to this volume (Friedlander 1995:21-27).

One of the main problems with Wegener's theory was that he believed that the continents "plowed" through the rocks of the ocean basins. Most geologists did not believe that this could be possible. In fact, the biggest objection to Wegener was that he did not have an acceptable theory of the forces that caused the continents to drift. He also ignored counter-arguments and evidence contrary to his theory and seemed too willing to interpret ambiguous evidence as being favorable to his theory (Williams 2000:59). For their part, the geologists ignored Wegener's copious body of evidence, allowing their adherence to a theory to override the actual data, when the scientific method would seem to demand the reverse approach - a common obstacle to the advancement of knowledge (see paradigm shift and confirmation bias)[citation needed].

Plate tectonics, a modern update of the old ideas of Wegener about "plowing" continents, accommodates continental motion through the mechanism of seafloor spreading. New rock is created by volcanism at mid-ocean ridges and returned to the Earth's mantle at ocean trenches. Remarkably, in the 1928 AAPG volume, G. A. F. Molengraaf of the Delft Institute (now University) of Technology proposed a recognizable form of seafloor spreading in order to account for the opening of the Atlantic Ocean as well as the East Africa Rift. Arthur Holmes (an early supporter of Wegener) suggested that the movement of continents was the result of convection currents driven by the heat of the interior of the Earth, rather than the continents floating on the mantle. In the words of Carl Sagan (1995:302-03), it is more like the continents are being carried on a conveyor belt than floating or drifting. The ideas of Molengraaf and of Holmes led to the theory of plate tectonics, which replaced the theory of continental drift, and became the accepted theory in the 1960s (based on data that started to accumulate in the late 1950s).

However, acceptance was gradual. Nowadays it is universally supported; but even in 1977 a textbook could write the relatively weak: "a poll of geologists now would probably show a substantial majority who favor the idea of drift" and devote a section to a serious consideration of the objections to the theory (Davis, 1977).


[edit] Various data
South America and Africa are moving apart at an average of 5.7 cm per year because the seafloor is spreading along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. This is comparable to the growth speed of a fingernail.[citation needed]

The fastest recorded seafloor spreading takes place along the East Pacific Rise at 17.2 cm per year.[citation needed]