Mesozoic Era · Jurassic Period
Earth 200 Million Years Ago: Pangea Begins to Break Up
What Earth looked like 200 million years ago: Pangea splitting as the Atlantic is born, lava floods, and the extinction that let dinosaurs take over.
Spin it in 3D and move through timeMap: Ancient maps: PALEOMAP PaleoDEMs (Scotese & Wright 2018), CC BY 4.0 · Natural Earth.
About 201 million years ago, rifts split Pangea between North America and Africa. Floods of lava, the Central Atlantic Magmatic Province, poured out over millions of square kilometres; their remains are found today in Morocco, eastern North America and Brazil.
The gases from these eruptions drove the end-Triassic mass extinction. Many large reptiles disappeared, clearing the way for the dinosaurs to dominate the Jurassic. Small early mammals were already living alongside them.
Seawater began to flood into the rift. Over the next tens of millions of years it widened into the central Atlantic Ocean.
Events of the time
Manicouagan impact
214 million years ago · Quebec, Canada
An asteroid about 5 km across left a crater about 100 km wide, now a ring-shaped lake visible from space.
Central Atlantic lava floods
201 million years ago · Morocco and eastern North America
As Pangea rifted, lava erupted over millions of km² (the Central Atlantic Magmatic Province), driving the end-Triassic mass extinction.
▶ Watch it happen on the globe
Part of the Mesozoic Era & Age of the Dinosaurs.