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Gondwana

Gondwana ( /ɡɒndˈwɑːnə/)[1] was a large landmass, sometimes referred to as a supercontinent. The remnants of Gondwana make up around two-thirds of today's continental area, including South America, Africa, Antarctica, Australia, Zealandia, Arabia, and the Indian Subcontinent.

This article is about the supercontinent. For the region in India, see Gondwana (India). For other uses, see Gondwana (disambiguation).

Gondwana was formed by the accretion of several cratons (large stable blocks of the Earth's crust), beginning c. 800 to 650 Ma with the East African Orogeny, the collision of India and Madagascar with East Africa, and culminating in c. 600 to 530 Ma with the overlapping Brasiliano and Kuunga orogenies, the collision of South America with Africa, and the addition of Australia and Antarctica, respectively.[2] Eventually, Gondwana became the largest piece of continental crust of the Palaeozoic Era, covering an area of some 100,000,000 km2 (39,000,000 sq mi),[3] about one-fifth of the Earth's surface. It fused with Euramerica during the Carboniferous to form Pangea. It began to separate from northern Pangea (Laurasia) during the Triassic, and started to fragment during the Early Jurassic (around 180 million years ago). The final stages of break-up, involving the separation of Antarctica from South America (forming the Drake Passage) and Australia, occurred during the Paleogene (from around 66 to 23 million years ago (Ma)). Gondwana was not considered a supercontinent by the earliest definition, since the landmasses of Baltica, Laurentia, and Siberia were separated from it.[4] To differentiate it from the Indian region of the same name (see § Name), it is also commonly called Gondwanaland.[5]


Regions that were part of Gondwana shared floral and zoological elements that persist to the present day.

Break-up[edit]

Mesozoic[edit]

Antarctica, the centre of the supercontinent, shared boundaries with all other Gondwana continents and the fragmentation of Gondwana propagated clockwise around it. The break-up was the result of the eruption of the Karoo-Ferrar igneous province, one of the Earth's most extensive large igneous provinces (LIP) c. 200 to 170 Ma, but the oldest magnetic anomalies between South America, Africa, and Antarctica are found in what is now the southern Weddell Sea where initial break-up occurred during the Jurassic c. 180 to 160 Ma.[38]

the movement of the Earth's continents relative to each other

Continental drift

Australasian realm

Gondwana Rainforests of Australia

The of Southern Africa

Great Escarpment

a theory which describes the large-scale motions of Earth's lithosphere

Plate tectonics

which proliferated during the Early Cretaceous (145–100 Mya) while Australia was still linked to Antarctica to form East Gondwana

South Polar dinosaurs

, a scholarly journal including Gondwana among its emphases

Gondwana Research

Houseman, Greg. . University of Leeds. Retrieved 21 October 2008.

"Animation of the dispersal of Gondwanaland"

Barend Köbben; Colin Reeves; Maarten de Wit. . ITC, University of Twente. Retrieved 16 October 2017.

"Interactive animation of the breakup of Gondwana"

Graphical subjects dealing with Tectonics and Paleontology

Gondwana Reconstruction and Dispersion

Archived 20 September 2019 at the Wayback Machine

The Gondwana Map Project

van Hinsbergen, Douwe J.J.; Torsvik, Trond H.; Schmid, Stefan M.; Maţenco, Liviu C.; Maffione, Marco; Vissers, Reinoud L.M.; Gürer, Derya; Spakman, Wim (September 2019). . Gondwana Research. 81: 79–229. Bibcode:2020GondR..81...79V. doi:10.1016/j.gr.2019.07.009. hdl:20.500.11850/390104.

"Orogenic architecture of the Mediterranean region and kinematic reconstruction of its tectonic evolution since the Triassic"