The formation of Pangaea Ultima some 250 million years from now would be bad news for mammalian life. But whether it would mean the end for mammals—or whether the supercontinent will form at all—is far from certain
There are dunes as far as the eye can see, parched and shimmering in the unforgiving sun. This gold and ochre sea of sand would seem infinite to any living creature wandering its vastness. But no one wanders this wasteland, and there is no water to drink. In this bereft, forsaken place—a place in which all landmasses have merged to form a single “supercontinent”—moisture and most animal life are merely a faded memory.
He had already applied climate models to Westeros and Arrakis . Why not turn those same forecasting techniques to Earth’s notional next supercontinent—essentially a fictional world, from our ephemeral point of view—and see what happens? When his initial modeling revealed “a quite toasty time period,” Farnsworth decided to team up with colleagues to turn his “fun” into a proper paper.
Working out the past motions of tectonic plates is tricky enough. But ascertaining future arrangements is even harder. The debate over the timing, assembly and final form of primeval supercontinents means that “it is not clear how long it may take to form the next one,” says Dietmar Müller, a geophysicist and plate tectonics expert at the University of Sydney, who did not participate in the new study.
The heat would be especially withering deep within Pangaea Ultima’s borders. Far removed from the global ocean’s moisture-carrying winds, the parched landscapes there would be on par with today’s driest and most desolate deserts, denuded of plants and precipitation alike. At the coasts, however, an abundance of atmospheric water would be a bigger problem. “You get more water vapor and more evaporation from the oceans nearby, and so you’re increasing that relative humidity,” Farnsworth says.
“Sweating is also huge—probably the most important thing,” Rummel adds. “The animal doesn’t really have to work to do anything once it pushes the water out. But water is expensive, and you have to go get more of it when you run out of it,” which would be an issue in future hyper-arid deserts.
Overall, if Pangaea Ultima comes to pass, “it’s very hard to make a mammal that can withstand the kinds of environments they’re proposing would occur,” Damuth says. Even if far-future mammals did find ways to manage the heat, the house-of-cards-style collapse of food chains could still starve them to extinction.
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