The Earth was once a single island surrounded by one ocean

Space · Published 27 October 2026 Swipe more like this →

In short: Imagine a world where you could walk from New York to Casablanca without ever boarding a plane or boat. For over 100 million years, the continents we recognize today were fused into a single landmass called Pangea, creating a geography that defies modern logic.

The supercontinent Pangea was fully assembled by the Early Permian Epoch, roughly between 299 and 273 million years ago. During this era, almost all of Earth's landmasses were joined together, surrounded by a singular global ocean known as Panthalassa. This massive geological assembly lasted from the Carboniferous period until it began to fracture during the Early Jurassic Epoch, approximately 200 million years ago.

The construction of Pangea was a complex process of continental collisions. By the Devonian Period, landmasses like Laurentia (North America) and Baltica (Eastern Europe) joined smaller microcontinents to form Euramerica. Later, by the beginning of the Permian Period, the paleocontinent Gondwana collided with southern Euramerica. The final piece of the puzzle was the Angaran craton of Siberia, which fused into the mass during the middle of the Early Permian.

The geography of this era is startlingly different from our own. Great Britain was not an island but bordered France and Norway; Italy was connected to Tunisia; and Tibet was linked to Australia rather than China. Even Brazil's famous beaches did not exist, as the land would have been landlocked against Namibia and Liberia. While textbooks offer simplified maps, these shifts were driven by plate tectonics—the same mechanism that continues to shape mountains, volcanoes, and the carbon cycle today.

Pangea was roughly C-shaped, stretching between the northern and southern polar regions. Its eastern edge featured a significant embayment called the Tethys Sea. Over time, this area saw complex transitions as parts of Gondwana detached and rotated northward, eventually leading to the formation of the modern Atlantic and Indian oceans.

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