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- By Shivangi Sharma
- Mon, 26 May 2025 09:05 PM (IST)
- Source:JND
The Pacific Ocean, Earth’s largest and deepest body of water, is slowly but steadily shrinking, and scientists believe this quiet geological change could eventually result in the formation of a new supercontinent called Amasia.
The Pacific Ocean is currently shrinking at a rate of approximately 2.5 centimeters (about one inch) per year. While this may seem negligible on a human timescale, it becomes significant over millions of years. According to researchers at Curtin University in Australia and Peking University in China, this consistent shift will eventually lead to a monumental collision between the landmasses of Asia and the Americas, forming a supercontinent within 200 to 300 million years.
The Supercontinent Cycle
The Earth’s landmasses haven’t always looked the way they do today. In fact, Earth has undergone a process called the supercontinent cycle, where all continents merge into a single landmass every 600 million years. This cycle has played out over the last two billion years, leading to the creation and breakup of previous supercontinents such as Pangaea and Rodinia.
Chuan Huang, a lead author of the study published in the journal National Science Review, explained, “Over the past two billion years, Earth’s continents have collided together to form a supercontinent every 600 million years. This means that the current continents are due to come together again in a couple of hundred million years.”
Amasia: Supercontinent Of The Future
To simulate the future configuration of the planet, Huang and his team used a supercomputer model. The results point to a scenario in which the Pacific Ocean closes entirely, and the continents merge, specifically, North America colliding with Asia to form a new supercontinent named Amasia.
Professor Zheng-Xiang Li of Curtin’s Earth Dynamics Research Group elaborated, “The Pacific Ocean is what is left of the Panthalassa superocean that started to form some 700 million years ago. It is the oldest ocean on Earth, and it started shrinking from its maximum size during the age of the dinosaurs.” Li added, “Its current dimension of about 10,000 kilometers is predicted to take two to three hundred million years to fully close.”
