The Pacific Ocean is disappearing, which will eventually lead to the emergence of a vast new supercontinent called Amasia, research suggests.
Scientists in Australia and China believe the ocean is shrinking by around one inch per year, gradually pushing the tectonic plates the Americas are resting on westwards.
They believe that the Pacific will completely close up in 200-300 million years, slowly uniting the continents of Asia, Australia, Antarctica, North and South America.
As part of a study published in journal National Science Review in September 2022, scientists from New Curtin University and Peking University in China used a supercomputer to simulate how the next supercontinent would form.
The simulation suggested that as the planet has been cooling over billions of years, the thickness and strength of the plates under the oceans have, over a long time, reduced.
This phenomenon makes it unlikely that the next supercontinent would form as a result of the Atlantic or Indian oceans shrinking, the researchers suggested, as they regard them as relatively young oceans in comparison to the Pacific.
Lead author of the study, Dr Chuan Huang, from Curtin’s Earth Dynamics Research Group and the School of Earth and Planetary Sciences, said the research gave insights into Earth’s distant future.
“Over the past two billion years, Earth’s continents have collided together to form a supercontinent every 600 million years, known as the supercontinent cycle,” he said.
“This means that the current continents are due to come together again in a couple of hundred of million years’ time.
“The resulting new supercontinent has already been named Amasia because some believe that the Pacific Ocean will close (as opposed to the Atlantic and Indian oceans) when America collides with Asia.”
Scientists also anticipate that Australia will play a role in Amasia forming, first colliding with Asia, before connecting America and Asia after the Pacific Ocean closes.
Dr Huang said by simulating how the Earth’s tectonic plates are expected to evolve, the team were able to show that “in less than 300 million years’ time it is likely to be the Pacific Ocean that will close, allowing for the formation of Amasia, debunking some previous scientific theories”.
Professor Zheng-Xiang Li from Curtin’s School of Earth and Planetary Sciences, a co-author of the study, said: “Earth as we know it will be drastically different when Amasia forms,” he said. “The sea level is expected to be lower, and the vast interior of the supercontinent will be very arid with high daily temperature ranges.
“Currently, Earth consists of seven continents with widely different ecosystems and human cultures, so it would be fascinating to think what the world might look like in 200 to 300 million years’ time.”
