Context: Recently, a research team used a supercomputer to show how a supercontinent forms by simulating Earth’s drifting tectonic plates.

Key Findings of the new research

• A new will form by merging Asia and the two Americas,

• Over the next 200-300 million years, the Americas and Asia will merge to form a new supercontinent named “Amasia” due to the shrinking of Pacific Ocean.

• Pacific Ocean is shrinking by nearly an inch every year and will result in disappearing of the Arctic Ocean and Caribbean Sea.

What does researchers say about supercontinents?

• Earth's supercontinents are formed in vastly two different ways - introversion and extroversion.

• The former involves the closure of the internal oceans formed during the break-up of the previous supercontinent

• The latter involves the closure of the previous external super ocean

Why Amasia?

• It is believed that the Pacific Ocean will close (as opposed to the Atlantic and Indian oceans) when America collides with Asia.

What is Amasia?

• As per the estimations made by a supercomputer, Australia would join the continent Asia as the Americas will be dragged to the west.

• The masses will finally come together when Africa closes in on Europe and Antarctica will join South America.

• The thickness and tensile strength of the tectonic plates beneath the seas had decreased over time as a result of Earth cooling over the course of billions of years since its birth.

• The Atlantic or Indian oceans are believed to be relatively young oceans and might develop as a result of the Earth's most recent supercontinent breaking apart and its fragments slowly drifting away.

• Every 600 million years, a supercontinent develops on Earth. This is known as the supercontinent cycle.

• Pangaea, the latest and most well-known, was founded around 300 million years ago and split between 120 and 130 million years later.

• This means that the current continents are due to come together again in a couple of hundred of million years’ time.

• The team discovered that the closing of a previous super ocean that had previously encircled a once-colossal land mass increases the likelihood.

• A new supercontinent will make the tectonic plates lose strength and thickness.

What will be the changes?

• The Earth's eco-system and biodiversity would be drastically altered by the collision of continents

• The sea level is expected to be lower.

• The vast interior of the supercontinent will be very arid with high daily temperature ranges.

How an Island is created by underwater volcanic activity?

• The passive lava flow on the seafloor hardens into rock and builds height of the underwater mountains, the formation is taken place in million years giving birth to “Volcanic Islands”.

• Some volcanoes which reach heights above the seafloor resulting in the lower pressure resulting in the explosive eruptions.

• The magma supply of the plate tectonic plays a large part in determining which submarine volcanoes will form islands

• The tectonic activity sometimes takes the island volcano away from the source of magma.

• Magma is originated in the mantle caused by moving and growing of the tectonic plate with the formation of volcano.