Wed February 8, 2012 'Amasia': The Next Supercontinent? The
Earth's continents are in constant motion. On at least three
occasions, they have all collided to form one giant continent.
If history is a guide, the current continents will coalesce once
again to form another supercontinent. And a study in Nature now
shows how that could come about. You can think of continents as
giant puzzle pieces shuffling around the Earth. When they drift
apart, mighty oceans form. When they come together, oceans
disappear. And it's all because continents sit on moving plates
of the Earth's crust. "Continents on these plates typically
move, I would say, at the rate your fingernails grow," says Ross
Mitchell, a graduate student at Yale University. That may seem
slow, but it adds up over hundreds of millions of years. Look at
an atlas and you can imagine how Africa and South America, for
example, once nestled together. "Rewind the tape and bring all
the continents back into their jigsaw arrangement, you have this
vast landmass of