The vast Pacific Ocean Earth’s deepest and most expansive body of water, is slowly but steadily disappearing. And according to a groundbreaking study by scientists from Curtin University in Australia and Peking University in China, this ancient ocean’s closure could give rise to a new supercontinent one that may reshape the future geography of Earth.
In research published in the journal National Science Review, scientists employed advanced supercomputing models to simulate the planet’s tectonic evolution. Their findings suggest that in the next 200 to 300 million years, the Pacific Ocean will close entirely, bringing together the Americas, Asia, and Australia into a single massive landmass dubbed “Amasia.”
Earth’s continents have repeatedly converged into supercontinents every 600 million years in a cycle known as the supercontinent cycle. New models show that Amasia will likely form not by the closure of the Atlantic or Indian Oceans, but by the Pacific closing a theory that challenges some earlier scientific predictions.
The Pacific Ocean, remnants of the 700-million-year-old Panthalassa superocean, has been shrinking steadily since the time of the dinosaurs. The current rate of closure, driven by subduction zones where tectonic plates dive beneath one another, suggests that the basin will vanish completely within a few hundred million years.
Australia will play a key role in this planetary reorganization. It is expected to drift northward, collide with Southeast Asia, and eventually become the geological bridge that connects Asia with the Americas.
This shift won’t happen overnight. Plate tectonics operate over immense timescales moving continents just a few centimeters per year. But the long-term trajectory is clear: as the Pacific Ocean retreats, the birth of Amasia could usher in a new chapter of Earth’s geologic history.
Understanding Earth’s tectonic future helps us grasp the underlying forces shaping planetary dynamics, climate evolution, sea levels, and even patterns of biodiversity over deep time.
The shrinking Pacific marks not just the end of an ocean, but the prelude to the next act in Earth’s billion-year geological play.