Supercontinent cycle

The quasi-periodic assembly and breakup of Earth's landmasses into single continents, roughly every 300–500 million years, driven by mantle convection.

Snowball Earth: Intervals when ice sheets reached low latitudes, freezing most of the planet's surface. Rodsinia's low-latitude position and enhanced weathering are leading triggers proposed for the Cryogenian glaciations.
Mantle convection: Slow circulation of hot rock in Earth's interior that moves plates and stirs the mantle over geological time. The engine whose downwellings and upwellings organize continents into and out of assemblies.
Pangaea: The supercontinent that assembled about 335 million years ago and began breaking up around 200 million years ago. The best-documented supercontinent, whose breakup Alfred Wegener's evidence originally described.
Alfred Wegener: German geophysicist who proposed continental drift in 1912 and reconstructed Pangaea from matching fossils and strata. His Pangaea reconstruction supplied the founding observation for the cycle.
Amasia: A hypothesized future supercontinent in which continents gather around the North Pole or Pacific closure. One leading forecast of where the next assembly will form, debated against alternatives like Aurica.
Marine transgression: A rise in sea level relative to land, flooding continental interiors with shallow seas. Supercontinent breakup subsides continental margins, causing some of the largest transgressions in the record.
Slab pull: The force exerted on plates as dense subducting slabs sink into the mantle. Pull from ring-shaped subduction around a supercontinent drives its eventual breakup.
Rodinia: A supercontinent assembled around 1.1 billion years ago and rifted apart from about 750 million years ago. Its breakup preceded the Cryogenian glaciations and is central to mid-Proterozoic reconstructions.
J. Tuzo Wilson: Canadian geophysicist who proposed the ocean-opening-and-closing cycle named after him in 1966. His Wilson cycle became the mechanism from which the supercontinent cycle was generalized.
Proterozoic plate tectonics: The question of when, and in what style, plate tectonics operated during Earth's middle age. Whether early assemblies were built by modern plate dynamics or by different, hotter-mantle processes.

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