Pangea Map

How to read the map

The map shows where today's continents sat about 200 million years ago Ma. Million years ago. Ma stands for megaannum, one million years. Source , as rebuilt by the MULLER2019 plate model. Darker tan is land, drawn from the model's coastlines. The lighter edge around it is the rest of the continental crust, including parts that lay under shallow seas. Use the time steps to move from 250 million years ago to today. Switch on "With countries" at any step to see where your country sat.

At 200 million years ago, the northern landmass is labeled Laurasia Laurasia. The northern of the two landmasses Pangaea first broke into, as proposed by Alexander Du Toit. Source and the southern one Gondwana Gondwana. Gondwanaland, the southern of the two landmasses Pangaea first broke into, as proposed by Alexander Du Toit. Source . The world ocean around the supercontinent is Panthalassa Panthalassa. The one ocean that surrounded Pangaea about 250 million years ago. Source , and the sea in the gap on its eastern side is the Tethys Tethys. The Tethys Sea, a vast ocean that separated India from Asia about 225 million years ago. It closed as India moved north. Source .

What was Pangea?

Pangea, or Pangaea, means "all lands" in Greek. USGS calls it the supercontinent that figured prominently in the theory of continental drift, the forerunner to the theory of plate tectonics. According to that theory, Pangea began to break up about 225 to 200 million years ago, and its pieces drifted into the continents we know today.

Alexander Du Toit, a professor of geology at Witwatersrand University and one of Wegener's strongest supporters, proposed that Pangea first broke into two large landmasses: Laurasia in the northern hemisphere and Gondwanaland in the southern hemisphere. These two then broke apart into the smaller continents of today.

Who first saw it

The idea is old. In 1596 the Dutch map maker Abraham Ortelius suggested that the Americas were "torn away from Europe and Africa . . . by earthquakes and floods". In 1858 the geographer Antonio Snider-Pellegrini drew maps of how the American and African continents may once have fit together.

In 1912 Alfred Lothar Wegener, a 32-year-old German meteorologist, presented continental drift as a full scientific theory in two articles. He held that Pangea began to split apart around 200 million years ago. His evidence was the fit of the South American and African coasts and identical fossil species found on both. Coal deposits from tropical plants in Antarctica, Glossopteris fern fossils in polar regions and glacial deposits in arid Africa, such as the Vaal River valley of South Africa, pointed to continents that had moved.

Wegener could not explain what force moved the continents. He suggested they plowed through the ocean floor, and the English geophysicist Harold Jeffreys argued correctly that this was physically impossible. Wegener froze to death in 1930 on the Greenland ice cap. Later evidence from the ocean floor revived his idea and led to the theory of plate tectonics.

About the reconstruction

Each time step is computed by the GPlates Web Service with the MULLER2019 model by Müller and others (2019), a global plate model that includes lithospheric deformation along major rifts and orogens since the Triassic. The service rotates today's continental outlines and coastlines back to each age, so shapes are today's coastlines in their old positions, not the ancient shorelines. Ages are the model's. For today's plates and boundaries, open the tectonic plates map.