The animation was posted Tuesday to Reddit, where it quickly gained over 3,500 comments and about 36,000 upvotes. Originally, it was posted online by news outlet Tech Insider in 2017. Tech Insider said the animation used projections from Chris Scotese, a professor at Northwestern University’s Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences.
The animation shows how the continents squeeze and contort over time, with Australia first drifting northward and Africa edging up into Europe. You can see the video posted to Reddit here and the original clip on YouTube here.
East Asia begins moving west, and Antarctica starts floating northward toward South Asia and the east coast of Africa. Eventually, North America and Western Europe merge across the Atlantic. By the time the 250 million year mark is reached, any current continental regions are barely distinguishable amid the large landmass. On the other side of the Earth is a huge stretch of ocean.
This would not be the first time that almost all the landmass on Earth is concentrated in one massive supercontinent. The last time this happened was during the Early Permian Epoch, around 299 million to 273 million years ago, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica.
That supercontinent was called Pangea—also spelled Pangaea—and it was surrounded by a global ocean called Panthalassa. It started to break apart around 200 million years ago and eventually formed the continents and oceans we know today.
Continents are in motion because heat from the radioactive processes within the Earth causes the Earth’s crust—which is made up of 15 to 20 moving tectonic plates resting on the molten rock of the mantle—to move.
Robert Butler, a professor of tectonics, geology and geophysics at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, told Newsweek the future supercontinent animation was “pretty crude and hard to judge,” as it does not show plate boundaries.
However, he said that “people might quibble about the details on the animation, such as their own place on the planet, but the overall principle is pretty solid.”
Butler also said that predicting future continental drift relies on using past records of continental movements and then extrapolating from them into the future.
“It’s pretty robust because the velocities of relative plate motion are slow and it’s nonturbulent,” he said. “We can track back plate evolution very accurately for the past, say, 200 million years, as the record of relative plate motion is charted by the record of sea-floor-spreading on the world’s modern oceans.
“You can test the extrapolations by fitting bits of geology together like parts of a jigsaw—the rocks on the continents rather than simply the edges, as these distort and break or recombine.”
Butler said the prediction of a future Pangea is not very surprising. “One thought is that supercontinents come and go in cycles over the past 3 billion years at least.”
