Pangea’s Second Coming Won’t Be Chill

Thinking geologically requires an unusual set of habits. These include an awareness that all geographies are ephemeral; an ability to hold in the mind’s eye many versions of the world; and a sense for the rates at which tectonic, climatic, and biological processes remake Earth. Although geology is typically viewed as a backward-looking field, these practices are increasingly being applied not only to the distant past but also to the far future.

An audacious new in , from eight researchers in the United Kingdom, China, Switzerland, and the United States, uses what we know about Earth’s habits over geologic timescales to imagine the conditions for life 250 million years from now, when tectonics will likely have gathered the world’s land masses into a new supercontinent. The study is the first to use a high-resolution climate model for a future global geography—and the researchers’ predictions do not bode well for us mammals: We would not survive the heat.