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When might continental drift cause additional major landmasses?
I just happened to be thinking about this today after reading the news article about the New Madrid fault in the Mississippi River region. Are there any particular drifts that have the potential of creating major landmasses or voids within the next hundred years or so? Or is everything fairly "stable" - moving at such a rate that we would be talking millions of years for such a thing to occur?
Just curious.
2 Answers
- QFL 24-7Lv 61 decade agoFavorite Answer
Tectonic changes and movements are on the order of centimeters per year at the fastest. That's the speed your nails grow. Nothing can really happen to the continents in 100 years.
In actuality, the continents are pretty stable over time. There are a dozen or so cratons (continental interiors) the shift, collide, split and rearrange over the course of millions and billions of years. So the edges change and take up all the action, but the middle is fairly stable. In other words, the cratons we have now are the same we've had for a long time, at least a few billion years. A big continent like Asia has many cratons (North China, South China, Tarim, and Siberia to name a few) that makes up the continent.
That's why the New Madrid is so special. It is the exception; a rift zone withina continet. These move even slower and have even less action.
- 1 decade ago
Millions, maybe billions of years. Think about it the earth is approximately 4.5 billion years old
