Pacific days are numbered, according to computer simulations. The good news is that we still have 300 million years to go. If we’re lucky, it might even celebrate its billionth birthday before disappearing from the world for good, Science Alert reports.
However, researchers from Australia’s Curtin University believe that the ocean will likely disappear before then, and that in its later years it will not resemble the vast blue ocean we know today.
The Pacific Ocean has been shrinking by a few centimeters every year since it surrounded the last giant continent, Pangea, as a superocean. This ancient ocean is home to many subduction zones (the area where plates collide is called a subduction zone).
The Pacific plate slides a few centimeters under the Eurasian and Indo-Australian plates every year, reducing the distance between North America, Asia and Australia.
There is no consensus among scientists about what the next supercontinent will look like or how it will form, but one thing seems certain:
According to the simulation, the Pacific Ocean is doomed.
There are studies that suggest that the Atlantic Ocean, which is expanding today, may begin to shrink in the future, creating a supercontinent surrounded by the massive Pacific Ocean. However, researchers at Curtin University disagree with this theory.
Instead of another continent similar to Pangea, as they think, a giant land mass will form in which North America and Asia collide, forming Amasya.
Australia is excluded from this equal classification, but in 4D geodynamic models, the southern hemisphere continent appears to play an important role in bridging the rest of the Pacific.
The latest simulations by Australian researchers are based on real-world past and present disk and cloak coefficients, which were then simulated on a supercomputer.
“Over the past 2 billion years, Earth’s continents have collided every 600 million years to form a supercontinent, which we call the supercontinent cycle,” says geologist Chuan Huang, who led the research.
By simulating the projected evolution of Earth’s tectonic plates with computer aid, we were able to show that in less than 300 million years the Pacific Ocean is likely to close, allowing the formation of Amasia, and disproving some previous scientific theories. he added.
According to the new simulation, when Amasia forms, the Pacific Ocean, not the Atlantic or the Caribbean, will be destroyed. In the current model, Amasia forms when the Pacific Ocean closes due to weakening of the uppermost layer of oceanic crust.
With the formation of Amasya, the world as we know it will change drastically. Sea levels are expected to drop, and the interior of the giant continent will experience severe drought with high daily temperature fluctuations.
The full study is a National Science Review It can be read in the magazine.
