Panthalassa When the Pacific Ocean turns into a dwarf

The ocean is a large body of salt water that extends around the land within very large ocean basins. These bodies of water occupy approximately 71% of the planet's surface, constitute more than 90% of the total amount of water on Earth, and are an integral part of the planet's sustainable existence.

At the moment there are 5 oceans on our planet, and scientists consider them as one body of water that has been divided according to the location in relation to continents and civilizations. These oceans differ in the area they occupy from the Earth's surface, but the Pacific Ocean is the largest and deepest of all, covering more than a third of the Earth's surface.

Although the Pacific Ocean represents the largest water mass on Earth, it is no more than the remains of the largest water mass in the history of our blue planet, the Panthalassa Ocean that surrounded the giant continent of Pangea from about 300 million to 200 million years. The Panthalassa can be imagined as if the Pacific Ocean and the Atlantic Ocean were joined together.

The Panthalassian Ocean occupied nearly 70 percent of the Earth's surface at the end of the Triassic period, according to a study published last January in Earth-Science Reviews.

Giant Panthalassa Ocean

According to Ocean Exploration , the Pacific Ocean occupies an area the size of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans combined. It contains more than half of the liquid water on the planet, and twice as much water as the Atlantic Ocean, the second largest ocean on Earth today.

The area of ​​the Pacific Ocean basin is more than 155 million square kilometers, which is greater than the land area of ​​all the continents combined. The Pacific Ocean is also the deepest water body on our planet, with an average depth of nearly 4,000 meters. And there is the Mariana Trench, which contains the deepest place on Earth , known as the Challenger Deep, which extends to a depth of more than 11 thousand meters.

Although the Pacific Ocean is large, Panthalassa's giant ocean actually made it a dwarf. The Panthalassian Ocean is referred to as "Paleo-Pacific" or "Ancient Pacific" or "Proto-Pacific", because the Pacific Ocean is a direct continuation of Panthalassa.

Super oceans

Panthalassa is one of the super oceans found on Earth. A superocean is an ocean surrounding a single supercontinent comprising all of the land on Earth, and is less commonly defined as any ocean larger than the present-day Pacific Ocean.

The global giant oceans include the Mirovia Ocean, which surrounded the continent of Rodinia about 650 million years ago, and the Panthalassa Ocean, which surrounded the island of Pangea, the newest in a chain of supercontinents in Earth's history. Before that, the giant continents were also surrounded by super-oceans.

"The biggest ocean usually happens when giant continents form, because if you have one continent," Brendan Murphy, professor of geology at St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia, tells Live Science . Only big, you'll only have one ocean around it."

This probably happened a few times, says Murphy. Pangea was the last supercontinent. If you were to fly across the equator, he adds, it would take 10 hours to cross the Pacific, but 15 hours to cross Panthalasa.

According to the Encyclopedia Britannica , about 200 million years ago, the supercontinent Pangea began to disintegrate to eventually form the modern continents, the Atlantic Ocean, and the Indian Ocean. The Pacific Ocean became a remnant of the Panthalassa. Since the demise of Pangea, the Pacific Ocean has been named the world's largest ocean.

Despite the area of ​​the Panthalassian ocean, which occupied more than two-thirds of the surface of the planet, it must be taken into account that the largest ocean that occupied the entire area of ​​​​the earth was found when there was no continent and the surface of the earth was almost completely covered with water, after only about 150 million years Who formed the earth.

At the same time, scientists consider the Earth's oceans at the present time to be one global ocean, as it was stated in the "Science Focus" website that although we gave the oceans of our planet separate names, in fact there are no boundaries between them, but rather Currents flow among themselves constantly and mix their waters.

The Atlantic Ocean mixes with the Pacific Ocean at the bottom of South America, connects with the Indian Ocean under Africa, and the Pacific Ocean extends from the Arctic Ocean in the north to the Southern Ocean in the south.