According to the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission of UNESCO (IOC UNESCO), the largest currently
The largest ocean in the history of the planet
The ancestor of the Pacific Ocean - Panthalassa - coveredthe entire world and surrounded the supercontinent Pangea from 300 to 200 million years ago. Panthalassa was larger than the Pacific Ocean by at least 3,000 km in width. How to imagine such a distance?
By Fama Clamosa — Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0
If you travel by jet plane throughequator, it would take a person 10 hours to cross the Pacific Ocean, but 15 hours to fly to Panthalassoy. In addition, at its widest point, the Pacific Ocean will accommodate five moon diameters, and the additional width of Panthalassa will accommodate one more.
According to a 2022 review in the journal Earth-ScienceReviews, Panthalassa eclipsed the Pacific Ocean, occupying approximately 70% of the Earth's surface or almost 363 million km². At the same time, according to the UNESCO IOC, the area of the Pacific Ocean is only 30% of the Earth's surface (about 165 million km²).
By Fama Clamosa — Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0
For the most part, Pangea fell apart due to the discoveryAtlantic Ocean due to Panthalassa. Its remnants turned into the Pacific Ocean. As a result, Panthalassa is like the Pacific Ocean glued to the Atlantic, which today stretches for about 2,900 km between Brazil and Liberia and 4,800 km between North America and North Africa.
What happened in the ocean?
The extinction at the end of the Triassic was far awaynot the largest on Earth. However, it was the first to directly influence modern evolutionary fauna. The onset of extinctions on land began simultaneously with the earliest full-scale volcanic eruptions, which began about 201.6 million years ago. In the ocean, this process began 50–100 thousand years earlier. Scientists linked these events to the rise of magma to the earth's crust.
However, the world's oceans show signs of environmental degradation hundreds of thousands of years before the Triassic extinction began.
To find out when ecology is on the planetbegan to deteriorate in fact, scientists measured concentrations of carbon, sulfur and mercury at the Kurusu section, near Inuyama, Japan. These layered radiolarian cherts are part of the Mino terrane, an accretionary complex of late Paleozoic and Mesozoic sediments.
The study of these siliceous rocks representsa complex of late Paleozoic and Mesozoic sediments formed at depths in the open ocean. In fact, this is a unique “window” into the Triassic-Jurassic period.
After analyzing the data, scientists cameto the conclusion that the stratification of the water column began to develop in the open ocean of Panthalassa more than a million years before the Triassic-Jurassic boundary. In other words, major environmental changes began approximately 1.2 million years before the end-Triassic mass extinction. Even then, changes in water composition had a strong impact on plankton communities in the ocean. In the depths of the ocean, oxygen-free conditions arose and gradually expanded. In fact, the process of extinction began already then, but it could not yet be called massive. As a result, extreme conditions arose in the ocean due to underwater volcanoes, which killed many of its inhabitants.
Was the ocean bigger?
Technically on Earth there was probably once morea larger ocean, but it was not defined by continents. According to the Smithsonian Institution, about 150 million years after the formation of the Earth, it had oceans, but no land yet. As a result, the ocean covered almost 40,075 km of the Earth's equatorial circumference and 510 million km² of the Earth's surface.
However, even today, scientists consider the Earth's oceansa single world ocean. The fact is that their waters connect at different points, according to the Marine Conservation Society. For example, the Atlantic mixes with the Pacific Ocean at the bottom of South America and touches the Indian Ocean under Africa.
What is the future of the oceans?
However, according to the definition of continents,The Pacific Ocean has been the largest ocean in the world since the death of Pangea about 200 million years ago. But if current predictions of plate tectonic movement are correct, Australia will split the Pacific Ocean in two within the next 70 million years. At the same time, the Atlantic will expand, becoming the largest on Earth.
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