Rodinia

Rodinia was a supercontinent assembled about 1.1 billion years ago and later fragmented. Its formation and breakup preceded those of Pangaea.

Grenville orogeny: A major mountain-building episode, roughly 1.2–0.98 billion years ago, associated with continental collisions during Rodinia’s assembly. Its mountain belts preserve evidence of the collisions that joined Rodinia’s continents.
Continental crust: The relatively buoyant, silica-rich outer layer of Earth that forms the continents. Rodinia consisted of continental crust assembled into a single landmass.
Shatsky Rise: A large volcanic plateau in the northwest Pacific Ocean, formed during the Early Cretaceous. Its position has been used to test hypotheses about Pacific-region fragments of Rodinia’s breakup.
Pangaea: A supercontinent that assembled during the late Paleozoic and began breaking apart in the Mesozoic. Pangaea formed hundreds of millions of years after Rodinia, in a later supercontinent cycle.
Paleogeography: The reconstruction of the geographic positions and arrangements of Earth’s landmasses in the geologic past. Competing paleogeographic maps place Rodinia’s continental blocks differently.
Plate tectonics: The theory that Earth’s lithosphere is divided into moving plates whose interactions shape the surface. Plate motions account for the continental collisions and rifting that shaped Rodinia.
Craton: An ancient, stable part of continental lithosphere that has resisted major deformation for billions of years. Cratons are the durable continental cores used to reconstruct Rodinia’s fragments.
Doushantuo Formation: A Neoproterozoic sedimentary formation in southern China known for fossils and records of environmental change. Its age and setting contribute to interpretations of life and environments after Rodinia’s breakup.
Columbia (supercontinent): A proposed Proterozoic supercontinent assembled roughly 1.9–1.5 billion years ago. Columbia predates Rodinia, though its configuration and status remain debated.
Apparent polar wander path: The apparent movement of a continent’s magnetic pole through time, reconstructed from paleomagnetic data. Different paths can support or challenge proposed positions of Rodinia’s fragments.

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