Asia and America Will Merge into a New Continent, Amasia

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The super continent named Amasia, which is a combination of America and Asia, is expected to occur 200 million to 300 million years into the future. Photo/New York Post

JAKARTA – The joining of the continents on earth today cannot be avoided. So the possibility of merging the continents of Asia and America to become Amasia (America-Asia) will be very likely to occur.

Basically this condition is the antithesis of the geological history of the earth which has been going on for the past two billion years. In the past, the continents that exist today were actually a unity.

The continents then break apart every 600 million years. From there it was finally known that the continents that exist today on earth, namely Asia, North America, South America, Europe, Australia, Africa and Antarctica.

Researcher from Curtin University, Professor Zheng-Xiang Li said the formation of the continents originally occurred because the earth had two or more large bodies of water, namely the Atlantic Ocean and the Indian Ocean, which are known as internal oceans.

Besides that, there is also the Pacific Ocean which is an external ocean. The continents were then formed due to the closure of the internal or external oceans.

It’s just that according to Professor Zheng-Xiang Li, this theory cannot be used as a basis anymore. Through their modeling, it turns out that the movement of the continents is very dependent on the strength of the oceanic crust between them. Only when the crust is strong can the continents change direction and reunite across the young internal oceans.

Conversely, as the mantle cools, the oceanic crust that forms above it becomes thinner and therefore weaker. Professor Zheng-Xiang Li and co-authors found that about 540 million years ago, Earth’s temperature cooled enough that the crust weakened to the point where a reversal like this could no longer occur. Therefore, Amasia and indeed all future supercontinents would have formed by traveling across the outer oceans.

When America moves west, Asia shifts east, then Australia will move north until it collides with Indonesia. Those conditions would carry over to what is now the South Pacific.

“Earth will change drastically when Amasia is formed,” explained Professor Zheng-Xiang Li.

“Earth currently has seven continents that host different ecosystems and human cultures. So, it is very interesting to imagine what our Earth will look like in the next 200 million-300 million years,” he concluded.

(wsb)