Texas and Antarctica were attached, rocks hint
AUG 17, 2011
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.025516
National Geographic : Pangea was not the only supercontinent in Earth’s past. Rodinia, its predecessor, contained most of Earth’s landmasses from about 1.1 billion to 750 million years ago. Staci Loewy of California State University, Bakersfield, and colleagues collected rocks from the North American Mid-continental Rift System, an ancient volcanic zone that runs from Canada to Texas, and compared them with rocks collected from mountains on the coast of the Weddell Sea in East Antarctica. Rocks from both sites match in age and lead isotope ratios, which shows that they erupted from the same rift zone—the two landmasses were connected at one time.
© 2011 American Institute of Physics
