When The Atlantic Ripped Open A Supercontinent

While the eruptions of the volcanoes along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge usually don't trouble us, their birth was once responsible for ripping a supercontinent apart and creating the Atlantic Ocean that we know today.
 
Correction: 2:28 A change of 100˚C = a change of 180˚F
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References:

[eons]

Some eagle-eyed viewers caught something we missed! At 2:28 we give the conversion of 100˚C = 212˚F, which is true for temperature, but not true for a change in temperature! A change of 100˚C is a change of 180˚F.

[verdatum]

Whenever I see those animations of how we believe the continents drifted over time, it just blows my mind that it can be demonstrated in just a few seconds, but it must have taken thousands of collective hours to put together all the information needed to work out the massive amount of detail contained within.

[GnomaPhobic]

I'm excited to hear about Earth getting a new supercontinent. It's always nice when the band gets back together for a new album.

[agni_oh]

I was watching old videos of this channel and just realized I've been watching y'all since high school... I'm a doctor now and every new video still fascinates me 💛

[lauroralei]

It still makes me bug eyed as a Millennial, that I can learn all this fascinating info and just take it for granted, and yet my parents in their mid-60s are older than plate tectonics being widely accepted in science. Incredible how knowledge accelerated in that time.

[kailawkamo]

Living in the Permian and the Triassic is truly an extreme sport

[Peannlui]

Sometimes Earth feels cute, sometimes Earth will delete later.

[tec-jones]

To think, just 50 million years after the most devastating mass extinction in Earth's history, caused by a massive basalt flood eruption, said events happened again! The Triassic couldn't catch a break, starting and ending with catastrophe!

[bazzer]

I remember in grade school in the 60s noting how Africa and South America looked like puzzle pieces that could be put together and being told it was coincidental. Plate tectonics was just starting to be widely accepted and I personally don't think my teachers had a clue about it. Cheers....

[rob_]

That wasn't the squirrel from the Ice Age?

[aruraven]

It's beautiful to think this planet will go on for much longer and keep changing and changing, and imagining how it will all look on such a scale. The universe is truly breathtaking.

[kevting]

Pangaea Proxima in 250 million years: WE ARE SO BACK!

[xaxinoreis]

I used to live in Raleigh, NC. When traveling between home and college along Interstate 40, I happened to notice that there was a long series of abrupt rolling hills in Durham and Chapel Hill. Curious about their geology, I learned these highly eroded hills are a series of filled-in rift valleys (called the Durham Basin) that formed in the Triassic from the breakup of Pangaea, part of a long series of rift basins that extend from South Carolina north through New York City to Nova Scotia called the Newark Supergroup. It's utterly wild to me that between ~220-190mya, these quiet, pine-forested hills, now dotted with sprawling McMansions from 2000s housing bubble, was once an active rift valley likely lined with lava-spewing volcanoes, dike swarms, and rift lakes.

[travisearly]

6:22 ouch. They really went for it, saying the quiet part out loud. Eons has reassured me that the next iteration of sapient life might overcome our mistakes when they get their chance.

[jaykpjohnson]

this series is so well done, thank you!

[Ryan-fiqp]

This was a great video, I love seeing what incredible things we've learned about so long ago. FYI, the temperature conversion at 2:28 (100 C = 212 F) is only true for actual temperature, not a change in temperature like you are talking about. Adding 100 C (or 100 K) is equal to adding 180 F.

[KuradiKylmdingdong]

0:20 When i visited my neighbouring country Finland years ago, i realised it sits mainly, if not entirely, on granite as compared to where i live that has thick crust of limestone despite being not too far away from each other and it made me wonder if Finland was never properly submerged under water. This simulation of continental drift confirmed my thoughts

[DivinePonies]

It always fascinates me how it wasn't until 70s that they started to figure all this out, while pretty much all elementary school kids seeing the atlas for the first time can tell that the continents fit into each other like puzzle pieces and that something sus must have been going on there.

[bulwinkle]

I recall pointing out to my teacher back in the mid 1950s that the continents looked like they must have been joined together. She told me not to be silly, How right I turned out to be, but nobody is ever going to credit a 5 or 6 year old boy.

[leshi]

I want a supercontinent so i can take a train to Europe