The Coming of Afrasia in a Dune Scenario Future!

"If Climate Change Continues On Its Present Path There Will Be No America or Europe Just One Continent Afrasia!" Black Coral Inc.

The human body is the engine of a stillsuit in The Sci Fi classic Dune. Walking, running, breathing—Herbert imagined all that energy could be harnessed to power the reactions necessary to recycle sweat etc. into water. Sadly,by today’s technology it’s still pure fiction: Our bodies can’t get enough energy from the food and oxygen we ingest to turn our waste back into drinkable H2O.

Since records have been kept, the average temperature of the global surface ocean has warmed by more than 1.5 degrees Celsius. Models suggest that all areas of the surface ocean will warm significantly more than this by 2100, especially in the high latitudes. And not just the poles... with a latitude of 72°00'N, Greenland is the country farthest from the equator in the Northern Hemisphere. It is followed by Iceland with a latitude of 65°00'N and Finland with a latitude of 64°00'N.Next impacted would be the bulk of Eurasia and North America. In the Southern Hemisphere, the Falkland Islands are the farthest away from the equator with a latitude of 51°45'S.

Not only will this affect the types of plants and animal life that survive but also humans will have to adapt to warmer climes in order to continue to exist. Most of the earths surface will be like the Turkana Basin of Kenya, where the average daily temperature reaches the mid-90s or higher, year-round, and has for the past 4 million years. Climate will most definitely influence the way humans evolved on the planet if the study is correct?

This warming will also have major implications for a number of key processes in the oceans, most of which will impact climate and weather patterns on land. In this blog, we have discussed the impact of climate change on the intensity and frequency of hurricanes, the potential shutdown of the global conveyor belt, the intensity of the ENSO cycle and the occurrence of oceanic hypoxia, but this recent study takes climate potential effect to a new level.

With the new continent, climate patterns will change, and a large part of Afrasia would be desert similar to the Sahara mainly because of a lack of maritime influence according to a study recently published in National Science Review highlights the findings by a team of researchers at Curtin University in Australia. The National Science Review Article is entitled "Will Earth's next supercontinent assemble through the closure of the Pacific Ocean?"

According to the study in prehistoric times because of the type of climate and other variables pertaining to the oceans the tectonic plates drifted apart but in the future they will come together due to the melting of the polar ice caps loss of the Pacific Ocean and warming of the globe!

The study states: "Earth's known supercontinents are believed to have formed in vastly different ways, with two endmembers being introversion and extroversion. The former involves the closure of the internal oceans formed during the break-up of the previous supercontinent, whereas the latter involves the closure of the previous external super-ocean. However, it is unclear what caused such diverging behavior of supercontinent cycles that involved first-order interaction between subducting tectonic plates and the mantle. Here we address this question through 4D geodynamic modeling using realistic tectonic set-ups"

"Our results show that the strength of the oceanic lithosphere plays a critical role in determining the assembly path of a supercontinent. We found that high oceanic lithospheric strength leads to introversion assembly, whereas lower strength leads to extroversion assembly. A theoretically estimated reduction in oceanic crustal thickness, and thus its strength, during Earth's secular cooling indicates that introversion was only possible for the Precambrian time when the oceanic lithosphere was stronger, thus predicting the assembling of the next supercontinent (Afrasia) through the closure of the Pacific Ocean instead of the Indian-Atlantic oceans. Our work provides a new understanding of the secular evolution of plate tectonics and geodynamics as the Earth cooled."

"Earth as we know it will be drastically different when (Afrasia) forms. The sea level is expected to be lower, and the vast interior of the supercontinent will be very arid with high daily temperature ranges," co-author Zheng-Xiang Li, from Curtin University, said in a statement.(Ed. Note since this concept is unproven the naming of the continent as Afrasia seems most apt because the bulk of the land left remaining for human habitation is from Africa, Asia and Australia most other nations including the British isles North and South Americas would be under water.)