The Next Supercontinent Could Be a Terrible, Terrible Place

About 250 million years from now, living on the coast could feel like being stuck inside a hot, wet plastic bag. And that bag would actually be the best home on the planet. Inland areas would be hotter than summer in the Gobi Desert, and up to four times as dry. This is life on Pangea Ultima, the supercontinent that an international group of scientists has predicted will form on Earth in a quarter of a billion years.

“It wouldn’t be a fun place to live,” Alexander Farnsworth, a climatologist at the University of Bristol, told me. Farnsworth is the lead author on published today in detailing how a supercomputer model predicted what Earth would be like in the far-distant future. According to his team’s calculations, 250 million years from now, the continents will reunite and Earth will become unbearably hot, rendering much of the land uninhabitable and leading to mass land-mammal extinction. If the team is right, everything would be, as Farnsworth put it, “very bleak.”