Only one supercontinent called "Pangaea".

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I used to think that there was only one supercontinent in the history of the Earth called Pangaea and then for some reason it broke apart hundreds of millions of years ago.

Your point?

It is still the prevailing theory.

Again, what is your point?

I thought the prevailing theory is that there were multiple supercontinents in the history of the Earth with Pangaea being the most recent one. I used the think that Pangaea was the only supercontinent ever and that for some reason some unique event happened hundreds of millions of years ago that caused it the break apart.

What caused you to change your mind and become wrong?

Scientist thought that too- discovered Pangea first, but then they figured out that the continents are like the seasons. They go in 200 million year cycles of breaking up and coming back together. When you go through school you probably go through the same stages of thinking that its one way, and then that its the other way as you study more advanced stuff.

But it sounded like you meant "one past supercontinent" as opposed to "no past super continents ever because the continents are stationary as they are now". And not what you really meant which was "one past supercontinent" as opposed to "a succession of supercontinents down through the eons".

Er guys there have been several theorized supercontinents throughout geologic history based on existing evidence.



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_supercontinents

Er...that's what both the OP, and I just said.

Er..cant you read?

Interesting. I never knew that.

My theory is (Though it would not surprize me if others have had the same or similar thoughts in the past) is that the land on the earth was one single unified mass, but the earth was smaller with no sea, as I noticed how the land patterns joined together not just to form one centralized land mass, but they look like they fit if the land was all joined like a ball.
Now the theory I hve fits in with the Biblical principles in Genesis, though it does not fit in so well with scientific theory where the two concepts are miles apart from each other. To this I sum up the possibilities in this respect. Either both are wrong or one is right and the other is wrong, but both can't be right together but that's another subject (Referring to the Biblical descriptions and scientific theory).

Continental drift was once considered fringe science. Most geologists at the time didn't think that continents actually moved.

I read book called "Supercontinent" by Ted Nield, which talks about a whole supercontinent cycle. Smaller continents merging into supercontinents and breaking apart again. Repeated over a span of hundreds of millions of years... Before Pangaea, there was Pannotia, but that was so long ago that the first animals had only just evolved and nothing lived on land yet.

Mom told me that when she was in a classroom in public school back in the Thirties, and got bored with what the teacher was saying, her gaze would often go beyond the teacher to that world map on the wall, and she would often think to herself "if you shoved South America over to the right it looks like it would fit right into Africa". My guess is that generations of school kids have had the same thought. But scientists couldnt imagine a force that could push continents around so yes..it was considered a scientific heresy.

But then came the cold war and with that came advanced submarines and with that ...the need by both superpowers to accurately map the sea floor. Mapping the sea floor they discovered evidence in the rocks of "sea floor spreading". The realizing that new crust wells up and becomes the floor of the sea and that the Atlantic is getting wider from the midatlantic ridge in the middle of the ocean. Continental drift is a byproduct of sea floor spreading because the continents just ride on top of that spreading sea floor crust. So now "Plate Tectonics"(they dont call it 'continental drift anymore' is the new orthodoxy."

There's some old-school geology in Tolkein. Back in his day, it was thought that the Earth's crust moved up and down, but never sideways. If there was evidence that two continents had once been linked (shared fossils, rock formations etc.) it was because there used to be land between them which has now sunk into the sea. And that's what you get in Tolkien's Middle Earth: drowned landmasses like Numenor and Beleriand, which used to be inhabited.

A generation before Tolkien wrote his novels an American named Ignatius Donnelly wrote "Atlantis, and the Antedulvian World" about a lost age when there was continent name "Mu" in the Pacific, and Atlantis in the Atlantic. It was albout fanciful empires and lost civilizations and fantasy geography and maps much like Tolkien's Middle Earth. The trouble is Tolkien didnt pretend to be writing anything other than fiction. Donnelly tried to palm off his visions as real science and history.