A decade before Nature and the UN signed up with Covering Climate Now, tectonic modeling favored northward drift of the plates over the next 200 million years, culminating in a supercontinent more Arctic than Equatorial, dubbed "Amasia":
Supercontinent cycles and the calculation of absolute palaeolongitude in deep time
Ross N. Mitchell, Taylor M. Kilian & David A. D. Evans
Nature volume 482, 208–211 (2012)
Abstract
Traditional models of the supercontinent cycle predict that the next supercontinent—‘Amasia’—will form either where Pangaea rifted (the ‘introversion’1 model) or on the opposite side of the world (the ‘extroversion’2,3,4 models). Here, by contrast, we develop an ‘orthoversion’5 model whereby a succeeding supercontinent forms 90° away, within the great circle of subduction encircling its relict predecessor
Their model's results looked like this:
A new study in Nature Geoscience ,
Climate extremes likely to drive land mammal extinction during next supercontinent assembly
emphasizes runs ending with more land close to the equator, and including CO2 outgassing of the mantle and a quarter-billion years worth of scary but un-tectonic, solar forcing from a brightening sun:
"Here we show that increased , solar energy (F⨀; approximately +2.5% W m−2 greater than today) and continentality (larger range in temperatures away from the ocean) lead to increasing warming hostile to mammalian life... predicted background levels of 410–816 ppm combined with increased F⨀ will probably lead to a climate tipping point and their mass extinction"
This somewhat recalls UN Secretary General Guterres' "The Gates of Hell have opened" Climate Week speech. According to CNN:
"If humans are still around in 250 million years, Farnsworth speculates that they might have found ways to adapt, with Earth resembling the 1965 science-fiction novel Dune. “Do humans become more specialist in desert environments, become more nocturnal, or keep in caves?” he asks. “I would suspect if we can get off this planet and find somewhere more habitable, that would be more preferable.”
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While Tectonic animations of deep time recapitulate the ground truth of continental drift ,paleontology and geochemistry, video renderings of models of the deep future remain more akin to Walt Disney's Fantasia. The Dino bits and Night on Bald Mountain are plenty scary, but given the chaotic evolution of flow over geological time, fast-forwarded renderings of the far future remain subject to Alfred Hitchcock's caveat,"It's just a movie." Farnsworth hopes to get around to a remake of the Amasia script , a project I suspect the late Frank Herbert would approve. |
