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dolly100
May 26, 2008, 12:14 AM
Pangaea known about it disintegrated
Why disintegrated ?
If was due to the rotation of the earth
What other reasons?

simoneaugie
May 26, 2008, 02:10 AM
Pangea was all of Earth's land masses all joined together long ago. Continental shift/drift broke it up. Rotation of the Earth may have contributed. Look at a map of the US. See Baja California, it's sliding up the coast of California, causing earthquakes as it moves.

Pangea didn't disintegrate, it changed into the land masses we are familiar with today.

asking
Jun 11, 2008, 08:32 AM
This is not quite correct. I don't believe the Earth's rotation is a factor, although I'm willing to consider if you have a reference.

Think of the Earth like a soft boiled egg. In the center is a liquid core of metal, surrounded by a thick "mantle" (egg white) and all covered by a shell (the crust). The outer shell is all cracked into pieces. That's what our crust is like. Each piece of cracked shell is a "tectonic plate." Except in the Earth, the mantle is semi liquid and convection currents cause it to flow and move the plates on top. Here, imagine ice breaking up on a pond or a river. The pieces of ice can move separately and if the water moves, the plates of ice move. The Earth's mantle flows and moves the tectonic plates.

So... the Earth's crust is composed of "tectonic plates" separated by "rifts," or cracks. The plates shift past one another, sometimes bumping together and sometimes moving apart, sometimes sliding past one another. In the middle of the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans are long cracks, called mid ocean ridges, from which molten rock is pushing up from beneath the crust. The pressures forces the two sides of the crack apart and causes adjacent plates to move apart, which is why Africa and South America have been steadily moving apart for a long time.

I recommend this: Mid-ocean ridge - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-ocean_ridge)

Hope this helps!
Asking