Supercontinents: A Formal Analysis

This essay on supercontinents was a tough piece to write about, but it was fun and I enjoyed writing about it. I had to think scientifically, but I also had to consider the audience on writing this paper. I had to go back and ask myself multiple times if the audience would understand this and be interested in reading this. I had to ask if this was too confusing, and if it was, what could I do to make it clearer and easier for the audience understand. This was probably the toughest essay out of all the ones that I’ve had to write about so far because I had to combine the flow of facts with the consideration of the audience. I had to find out how the supercontinents were made, what it took to make them, and what were the aftereffects of them, …show more content…
Hundreds of millions of years ago as far back as the Jurassic era. According to Wikipedia (2016) Many earth scientists, such as P.F. Hoffman (1999), use the term "supercontinent" to mean "a clustering of nearly all continents". (par. 1). These were enormous masses of land conjoined together for thousands to millions of years, until our planet started to change. These supercontinents, were as big as all of ours in modern time put to together, or just half of them would make one. Throughout time we’ve had multiple supercontinents. The Earth has had multiple different shapes and formations. Something that has been asked multiple times is, “Do we have any supercontinents now?”. The answer is no. Why is that we aren’t a supercontinent now, but we had them before? The reason we don’t have them now is because we don’t have enough land mass in a certain area, or they’re not close enough to each other to be considered one. It would be possible if Africa and Eurasia would be closer together. People argue that Eurasia is a supercontinent, but according to P.F Hoffman that would not be counted as one. Even though, it could be argued that we have supercontinent now, all things change, and the supercontinents are not an …show more content…
Wherever they were positioned at, it would affect the atmosphere. Oxygen was negligible back then. Scientists say that the oxygen rates were six to seven stages higher than what they are in the present day (21 percent) when the megacontinents were around. There are theories on why the oxygen levels were higher back then. One of the theories is when the collision of the land, causing enormous mountain ranges on the supercontinents (supermountains). These mountains were believed to have eroded releasing nutrients and minerals such as iron into the ocean. Due to this, it allowed for mass reproduction of photosynthetic organism to prosper. This is directly related to the atmosphere, raising the oxygen levels to an extreme