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The Next Supercontinent: Solving the Puzzle of a Future Pangea Kindle Edition
An internationally recognized scientist shows that Earth’s separate continents, once together in Pangea, are again on a collision course.
You’ve heard of Pangea, the single landmass that broke apart some 175 million years ago to give us our current continents, but what about its predecessors, Rodinia or Columbia? These “supercontinents” from Earth’s past provide evidence that land repeatedly joins and separates. While scientists debate what that next supercontinent will look like—and what to name it—they all agree: one is coming.
In this engaging work, geophysicist Ross Mitchell invites readers to remote (and sometimes treacherous) lands for evidence of past supercontinents, delves into the phenomena that will birth the next, and presents the case for the future supercontinent of Amasia, defined by the merging of North America and Asia. Introducing readers to plate tectonic theory through fieldwork adventures and accessible scientific descriptions, Mitchell considers flows deep in the Earth’s mantle to explain Amasia’s future formation and shows how this developing theory can illuminate other planetary mysteries. He then poses the inevitable question: how can humanity survive the intervening 200 million years necessary to see Amasia?
An expert on the supercontinent cycle, Mitchell offers readers a front-row seat to a slow-motion mystery and an ongoing scientific debate.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherThe University of Chicago Press
- Publication dateMay 24, 2023
- File size6213 KB
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Editorial Reviews
Review
"Ross Mitchell provides a cinematic view of Earth over billion-year timescales, showing how the slow-motion dance of the continents has a deep underlying logic that makes it possible to predict geographies of the distant future." -- Marcia Bjornerud | author of "Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World"
“Mitchell is the only person who could write this inviting and engaging book, which shares the thrill of scientific discovery.” -- Brendan Murphy | St. Francis Xavier University
"The world is like a giant clock, with enormous tectonic gears of seemingly infinite complexity. That clock will keep ticking long after we humans are extinct, and Ross Mitchell, watchmaker, lets us see far into that future: an amazing Amasia." -- Peter Ward | author of "Rare Earth: Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe"
“A clear, accessible introduction to a ‘super’ significant topic—the supercontinent cycle—and to scientific study itself.” -- Richard E. Ernst | Carleton University
"An engaging insider’s story of geological discovery and insight at a grand scale—the unification and fragmentation of supercontinents over geologic time, and why such behavior is repeating, yet changing. This first-hand account reads like The Double Helix, but with mountains for molecules." -- Paul Hoffman | Harvard University
"This lovely book, though, is a story of how quickly we are changing what it is we know, how we think, and how we think about how we think. And what it is we value most. None of our descendants will survive long enough to see any practical effects of tectonic change. The reshaping of the continents will not matter to our species. We will not be there. We are not an especially careful mammal. If we are lucky, maybe we have a million years to go, maybe even two. But this book is not about that. It is ultimately about science, as the new religion of our times, and how we think of eternity. It is about us, and what we are becoming." -- Danny Dorling ― Resurgence & Ecologist
"Although Mitchell’s destination is the distant future, don’t be fooled. His book is as much a romp through the past as it is a look ahead, complete with references unique to the present....Throughout the book, Mitchell’s clear explanations and carefully chosen images help make sense of even the most complicated concepts." ― Science News
"Locked in rocks, mountains, and oceans lies evidence of an ancient, active earth. Subduction, plate tectonics, and volcanic activity continually reshape continents. . . . [Those] interested in geology and geophysics will appreciate Mitchell’s compelling vision and research." ― Booklist
About the Author
You know you're narrating a character right when your children grab your arm and say, "Daddy . . . read the bad guy normal, you're scaring us with the voice." Aside from reading villains in storybooks really well, Derek Shoales has worked on corporate, eLearning, and commercial voice-over projects, been a graphic/web designer and an inventory market mentor, sung bass to baritone in choirs, and played the guitar, electric violin, and Clare whistle.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
In this book, I will layout the leading contenders for the geography of the next supercontinent, explore the modern mysteries that still surround plate tectonics, and explain the science behind predicting how continents move. Alas, predicting the next supercontinent is not as simple as understanding today’s movements and pressing fast-forward. Tectonic plates move slowly, at about the same speed that our fingernails grow. But GPS is now precise enough to detect this slow motion. And residents of Pompeii, San Francisco, and Fukushima can tell you that the effects of those movements are hard to perceive—until they are devastating. Volcanoes, earthquakes, and tsunamis are evidence of plate tectonics’ power. So is geography—just look at the abrupt bend, or kink, in the chain of the Hawaiian Islands. These islands formed a straight chain of semicontinuous volcanic activity for about 30 million years, until a sudden pivot occurred over the course of a few million years or less. The bend is a record of that pivot. Why did this happen? The tectonic plates are all interconnected, so any change in the movement of one plate causes adjustments in them all. Thirty million years ago, Australia broke away from Antarctica and started its current path north across the Pacific Ocean. Whereas the Pacific plate had been moving directly north before the bend, Australia’s breakaway in the western Pacific caused the motion of the Pacific plate to deflect toward the northwest after the bend. No plate is moving alone and each plate interacts with its neighbors along their shared boundaries. Plate tectonics is the dance of all plates and the seven major continents (or eight, depending on how you define them) they carry, constituting a global choreography, with dozens of smaller plates in between.
The earliest understanding of plate movement was the sixteenth-century idea of “continental drift”—that the continents migrated like rafts slowly into their current position, floating on an imperceptible layer within the earth. But this theory was largely written off because it was not clear what sort of mysterious substratum the continental rafts would be floating on. By the beginning of the last century, we still knew very little about the interior of the earth. Eventually, as seismology— the study of inner Earth using the vibrations generated from earthquakes— developed and submarines were put to good use after World War II to map the seafloor, the hypothesis of plate tectonics changed geology forever. Breaking Earth’s seemingly rigid surface into an interlocking mosaic of different plates that pushed and pulled each other provided a unified explanation for the origin of many of Earth’s great geological features, such as mountains, volcanoes, earthquakes, and oceans. But as exciting as the early plate tectonic revolution was, it didn’t have all the answers. For example, the hot interior of the earth was likely convecting, in a movement driven by temperature changes, just like the circulation of air in the atmosphere; but how these deep convective cells related to the push and pull of the plates at Earth’s surface would remain elusive for decades—and the details of this interaction are still unsolved.
Product details
- ASIN : B0BY5M642R
- Publisher : The University of Chicago Press (May 24, 2023)
- Publication date : May 24, 2023
- Language : English
- File size : 6213 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Not Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Print length : 287 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,217,338 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #250 in Geology (Kindle Store)
- #1,214 in Geology (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
![Ross Mitchell](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/01Kv-W2ysOL._SY600_.png)
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- Reviewed in the United States on July 6, 2024Very interesting subject matter. It was written in a way that is easy to understand. After finishing the book, I went out in my back yard and found a fossil embedded in sandstone. Talk about instant feedback.
- Reviewed in the United States on September 23, 2023This book presents wonderful information on how supercontinents form and break apart.
I was very pleased with all the new information it contained.
The author, however, should have stopped two chapters before he did.
One chapter dealt with how/if we would survive the next supercontinent. What will happen to all the people living on the Eastern Seaboard when it slammed into South America. Well, since this will take 200 million years to happen, I think we might just have plenty of time to adjust.
The last chapter dealt with Climate Change, how it is all our fault, and golly wasn't Obama (?) just the most wonderful person of all time.
So, if you rip out the last two chapters, the book is a wonderful description of how
supercontinents form and what the next one will look like. The last two chapters show what happens when an author goes wandering out of his field of knowledge.
- Reviewed in the United States on September 7, 2023This is a lovely book. Michy does an excellent job telling stories about how geological research is done to solve Earth's mysteries. I particularly enjoyed the stories about the oldest Supercontinent, Nuna.
- Reviewed in the United States on August 4, 2023I've always found Rodinia more fascinating than Pangea. And the superoceans more fascinating than the supercontinents. (This book doesn't have a lot of content on the superoceans.)
- Reviewed in the United States on September 28, 2023I highly recommend Ross's new book, whether you are a college student interested in geology or a geology expert. Although I am quite familiar with the current arguments regarding the shape of each supercontinent, I learned so much about the histories behind these arguments. Ross also thinks systematically, connecting various fields in Earth Sciences, which significantly broadened my horizons. In addition, Ross shares his own life stories of how to become a true geologist, making the book exceptionally enjoyable to read.
- Reviewed in the United States on July 3, 2023It's rare to have an engaging popular portrayal of the current science written by a scientist involved in the research. That's what we have here - connected to story that spans 100s of thousands of years. Learned a lot and glad I read this.
- Reviewed in the United States on May 26, 2023The strong points of the book are that Ross Mitchell shows how the study of geology works and, indeed, discusses the process of science to a certain degree. I enjoyed the personal anecdotes and Mitchell comes across as a good storyteller and very personable writer. I thought that the maps added great value to the story. But outside of the anecdotes, I did not find the writing compelling and some of the information was over my head as the book turned out to be more technical than I expected. But I feel that people with greater knowledge of geology will love this book. Thank you to Edelweiss and University of Chicago Press for the digital review copy.