• mycodesucks@lemmy.world
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    3 hours ago

    Conservatives: “See??? Why on EARTH should we invest in rail now when it’s just going to be broken up by continental drift in 200 million years? It’s woke liberal tax and spend waste!”

  • Deme@sopuli.xyz
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    5 hours ago

    I think that’s not actually Pangea (the past supercontinent), but a rendition of Pangea Proxima (the future supercontinent). So just gotta wait a while…

    • fireweed@lemmy.world
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      4 hours ago

      It’s definitely not pangea. For one, South America and Africa are not connected (which is the one thing everyone knows about plate tectonics). However what initially jumped out to me was India and the Himalayas (which are a relatively recent geological event).

    • WoodScientist@lemmy.world
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      2 hours ago

      I feel any predictions on a timescale of millions of years is completely pointless. The assumption is always that you can just look at natural processes and assume that things will continue naturally.

      Except we’re already in the Anthropocene! The Earth no longer evolves naturally; it evolves according to our actions. And our abilities only increase with time. Even the position of the continents is something we can control if we want it badly enough. And eventually, as human capabilities increase, eventually even controlling the position of continents becomes a rather modest infrastructure project. It all depends on the scale and abilities of your civilization.

      Hell, I don’t even agree with predictions about the lifespan of the Sun. Stellar engineering is in principle possible, and we have many millions of years to figure it out. Really, it’s not technically challenging; it’s just a problem of scale.

      So no. I don’t think a supercontinent will form and wipe out humanity, unless we will such a thing to be so. And I’m not even assuming the future is all rosy. We could have a nuclear war, rebuild ourselves from the ashes, and repeat that until we burn through all the uranium, and we would STILL have millions of years to solve these very long term issues.

    • megopie@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      3 hours ago

      The image is of a hypothetical future Pangea not the original, so those mountains would form due to re-collision of Europe and North America.

      • ProfessorHoover@infosec.pub
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        2 hours ago

        Oh great, so in a hundred million years Iceland is going to be crushed? We should be thinking about evacuating the puffins.

  • expatriado@lemmy.world
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    7 hours ago

    i think during Pangea, the center of the land was a big ass desert, and a very dry one, the network would probably look like a doughnut

    • EmoPolarbear@lemmy.ca
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      3 hours ago

      Oh I just saw the answer to this in the new Dinosaurs doc on Netflix, assuming it’s accuracy. At the beginning of Pangea the center was a desert with only the edges having any plant life, then there was a geologic event I think a large number of super volcanoes that caused a climate shift and there was a million years of hurricanes, when the storms finally subsided Pangea was green all over

    • arrow74@lemmy.zip
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      4 hours ago

      That empty land would allow for some nice desert crossings. Empty land is easier to develop and you can go faster.

      I’m imagine a donut with at least 2 dessert lines but maybe more. Likely a terminal town would appear in the center of the continent to be used for transfers