Location of future supercontinent predicted

Ever look at a map and wonder what it would be like if South America and Africa still fit together like puzzle pieces in one massive supercontinent? Geologists had previously thought that the next supercontinent would either form in the same place as the prior one, Pangaea, or on the complete opposite side of the world.
Yale geologist Ross Mitchell and his team, however, think that the next supercontinent, which Mitchell dubbed Amasia, will form over the Arctic Ocean.
There have been as many as four supercontinents in the Earth's history, and most scientists agree that there is another one in Earth's future, most likely in the next 50 million to 200 million years.
Some scientists believe that this will occur through introversion, which is when the young, Atlantic Ocean would close to essentially recreate a futuristic Pangaea, which was centered over Africa.
Other scientists have an extroversion hypothesis, where the older Pacific Ocean would close completely, forming a supercontinent on the other side of the Earth.
Mitchell and his team believe that the next supercontinent, named Amasia for the convergence of the Americas with Asia, will form according to their orthoversion model.
They came up with this model by looking at past supercontinents to see how far apart they had been from each other. Mitchell's team examined the magnetism of ancient rocks to determine the previous patterns of continental plate motion.
Through their modeling, they found that there was a distance of 90 degrees between Pangaea and its predecessor, Rodinia, which existed one billion years ago. There was also a distance of 90 degrees between Rodinia and Nuna, which formed 1.8 billion years ago.
Due to those measurements, Mitchell and his team inferred that the next continent will also be 90 degrees away from the previous continent, which is called orthoversion. Instead of forming over the Pacific or over the Atlantic, this model predicts that Amasia will form as a result of the closing of the Arctic and Caribbean Seas.
Mitchell sees his prediction as a middle ground between the introversion and extroversion theories. Instead of the new supercontinent existing zero degrees or 180 degrees from Pangaea, this one will be 90 degrees from the former supercontinent.
Nevertheless, Mitchell's theory is only a model. Hopkins University's Earth and Planetary Sciences professor Peter Olson feels that any type of prediction about the future has to be determined by the past, which is what Mitchell's study is based on.
However, he thinks that, since the study is focusing so far into the future, there is no way to know what trends will actually be repeated. Olson is particularly concerned about the fact that Mitchell's theory involves a change in plate tectonic patterns, as North America is currently moving away from Europe.
These current trends most likely support the extroversion theory. "He's not arguing that the current trends will produce this; he's arguing that some expected trends will produce this anticipated trend," Olson said.
"If the current trends need to be modified, even if you have a good reason why they are going to be modified, you're still asking for a modification. And that's where their prediction becomes more problematic."
While there is no way to tell exactly where the next supercontinent will occur, Mitchell believes that studying these trends is important because they contribute to the scientific knowledge of how continental plates move.
"There are numerous implications of our result, with relevance both to our concepts of the internal workings of the Earth and to the better understanding of its changing surface geography," Mitchell wrote in an email to The News-Letter.