EARTH

Pangaea

~335 to 175 million years ago

Phanerozoic · Paleozoic · Carboniferous

Nearly every major landmass gathered into one continent reaching from pole to pole, with a single ocean around it. Its interior lay a thousand kilometres from any coast, and little rain reached that far: the middle of the world was desert.

Why it matters

A single continent means a single set of neighbours. Species that had evolved apart met and mixed, coastlines shrank, and the climate, with less sea to temper it, swung harder from season to season and from one millennium to the next. Then Pangaea broke apart, and its pieces are the continents we live on.

Dating & uncertainty

Collisions ran from about 380 Ma, and the last pieces joined in the Late Carboniferous or in the Permian, depending on which suture is taken as final. Rifting began around 200 Ma, and the Central Atlantic opened near 175 Ma.

Sources

1. Stampfli et al. (2013), Tectonophysics · The formation of Pangea
2. Murphy et al. (2025), Elements · Assembling Pangaea: the complex morphology of the Laurussia-Gondwana collision
3. Xu et al. (2022), Tectonics · The Serpukhovian-Bashkirian amalgamation of Laurussia and the Siberian continent

Earth history as one day

22:13:441 h 46 min before midnight

if Earth’s 4.54 billion years were compressed into a single day