EARTH × CLIMATE

Rodinia Assembles and Breaks

~1.1 billion to 700 million years ago

Proterozoic · Mesoproterozoic · Stenian

Nearly every continent then in existence collided into a single mass around what is now North America, held for some 150 million years, then came apart in pulses as mantle plumes rose beneath it. The break-up did not scatter the pieces at random: it left fresh rock and long coastlines in the tropics, where the rain falls hardest.

Why it matters

Weathering tropical rock consumes carbon dioxide, and consuming carbon dioxide cools the planet. That is one reason the break-up of a supercontinent keeps turning up in explanations of what came next: the two hardest freezes the Earth has known.

Dating & uncertainty

Reconstructions rest on palaeomagnetic poles that are still sparse for most cratons, so the arrangement of the continents inside Rodinia varies between models. Assembly is placed between 1.3 and 0.9 Ga, break-up from about 800 Ma, with final separations as late as 600 Ma.

Sources

1. Li et al. (2008), Precambrian Research · Assembly, configuration, and break-up history of Rodinia: a synthesis
2. Merdith et al. (2021), Earth-Science Reviews · Extending full-plate tectonic models into deep time: linking the Neoproterozoic and the Phanerozoic

Earth history as one day

18:11:065 h 49 min before midnight

if Earth’s 4.54 billion years were compressed into a single day