Supercontinent Cycle

The supercontinent cycle, also called the Wilson cycle at the scale of individual ocean basins, is the proposed quasi-periodic pattern by which the continental crust of the Earth repeatedly assembles into a single supercontinent, rifts apart into separate continents that drift outward across a growing ocean, and is eventually drawn back together again as that ocean closes by subduction. Pangaea, which assembled roughly 335 million years ago and began breaking apart around 175 million years ago, is the most recent supercontinent in the proposed sequence, with Rodinia and Columbia (also called Nuna) reconstructed as earlier ones.