Pangaea Gazette

Poets, Painters, Thinkers and Explorers WANTED – Illustrators to submit drawings and paintings, poets to submit musings, budding scientists to submit theories, that discuss the way the world looked at the different times described in the following reports, spanning from 300 million years ago to 1,000 million years ago. To apply, send your work as email attachments to camp@campinternet.net - or – mail them to Camp Internet 1562 Cougar Ridge Road, Buellton CA 93427. Include your name, school, teacher’s name and grade level on the reverse of your work.

300 million years ago

Today Pangaea is one great huge continent with reptiles roaming the land. Some retiles also enjoy living a good part of the time in lakes and in the sea. Still others have tall crested backs. Insects crawl the land and spiders spin their webs. Soon turtles, crocodiles and frogs that enjoy the abundant moisture in the water planet join them. Early plants are gigantic horsetail with long skirts of green narrow leaves at their joints, and huge fields of ferns stretching for miles. The seas are filled with fish and creatures living in seashells.

240 million years ago

Pangaea has been on the move since our last report. No longer one nearly continuous landmass, it has separated into different sections that are still connected through land bridges. The dinosaurs starting to roam the land can migrate from one corner of Pangaea to another, and the herds move and resettle on different sections of Pangaea. The

temperature of the earth is still very warm at the surface, the plants are tropical, and the air is humid.

150 million years ago

It has been the Age of the Dinosaurs for 40 million years – they are the dominant species on the planet and continue to evolve. Pangaea is going through another stage of change, this time the land bridges are breaking up and the creatures no longer can travel freely across the Pangraean surface. Groups that migrated to remote distances can no longer return, but those migrations took place so many generations ago no one is worried about these changes. With these changes and shifts in the earth’s crust, there are climate changes too.

Areas in the far southwest of the continent Laurasia are experiencing prolonged dry seasons. Other area are filled by lakes and have vast swamps that provide ample food to the absolutely gigantic dinosaurs that command the landscape reaching up to 40 feet in height. Towering Sequoias, pine, Fir and magnolia trees grow – and the first flowering plants have miraculously appeared. Very little of the western side of Laurasia is even above sea level. The Pacific Ocean laps up against what will later be classed Arizona. Utah is covered by an inland ocean that extends from the artic down into what will later be called the Four Corners. A little further east, a vast lake covers the land. But to the south, things are drier, and he dinosaurs that live there don’t find much green food to eat.

65 million years ago

Something horrible has happened. The skies are dark with debris for a year. Little sunlight reaches the earth. The plants are dying back. And the animals that feed on them – like the huge long necked dinosaurs - are also dying back. Reporters are needed to explain this terrible event that seems to be effecting every place on earth be creating an extended winter. The meat eating dinosaurs that feed on the plant-eating dinosaurs are unable to find enough food. Soon there are no more dinosaurs left. But Pangaea has gone right on moving and shifting since our last report. The continents are now clearly separated and have taken a position much like they will stay in for the next 100 million years. But the volcanic activity beneath the Atlantic is still going on, pushing the plates into one another slowly and steadily.

4-5 million years ago

All of this shifting and crashing over the last 100 million years has changed the landscape on every continent. IN what will one day be called North America, entire new mountain ranges have lifted up from flat plains. Someday to be called

the Sierra Nevada and Rocky Mountains, these ranges change the climate again, creating deserts in their rain shadows. An entire section of the southwest was lifted up a mile in the sky to form what will someday be called the Colorado Plateau. A rift formed where the Rio Grande River would soon run. The rivers centralize and start carving canyons in the landscape that is growing steeper and steeper as it rises. Where there was once a huge mountain in the southwest, erosion has carved it down and is seeing a river carve out a magnificent grand canyon across its surface. At the bottom of this Grand Canyon there will eventually become exposed a 1.7 billion year old layers of rock. The world is now well into the Age of the Mammals, and many of the creatures that will be living on the earth in 5 million years have ancestors from this period. Deciduous forests now cover much of North America, with the evergreen Sequoias from the Age of the Dinosaurs still hugging the mountains where there remains abundant moisture.

1 million years ago

Pangaea is continuing to move and change, but now on a smaller scale. Volcanoes erupt around the world, mostly along the edges where the plates collide with one another, particularly around the rim of the Pacific in what will someday be called the Ring of Fire. With the Atlantic pushed new land to the east of its ridge, and to the west of its ridge, these tow forces will eventually collide, and the do so a they slam into the Pacific plate. All around the Pacific there are incredible earthquakes, massive folding and faulting as the earth shifts under enormous pressure. In some places, the first footsteps of human-like are left imprinted in the soft volcanic soil that then hardens, capturing their stride intact for millions of years. The Age of the Mammals now sees mighty Mammoths and Mastodons roaming the earth. Huge fierce saber tooth tigers are a threat to the smaller animals. And cattle and sheep have been clustering in herds for the last 2 or more million years.

30,000 years ago

The earth enters into an ice age and as the water is frozen into massive blocks thousand of miles in size, the sea water level falls. And once again land bridges reappear. Early people begin crossing this bridges following the big game that is the source of their food in these cold, plant less times, unknowingly crossing between continents. Others sail along the edges of continents first with the sunrise on their right, then later with the sunrise on their right as they sail north and the follow the coast as it turns to the south.

The continents and their mountain ranges extend further out into the sea than they may ever have before.

13,000 years ago

In the American southwest, a sea faring people land on the California Channel islands, eventually they migrate over to the mainland/. Other peoples are moving south to find warmer weather, and the climate is changing. The earth is warming up, the ice is melting, vast areas of the Southwest once covered by hundreds of miles of snow thaw out, and plants begin to grow.

1,000 years ago

Small tribes of people are living in many areas of he Southwest. They build pit house, then cliff dwellings, and then magnificent stone and adobe cities. But suddenly, a terrible volcanoes erupts scattering ash and debris over most of the Southwest. People move to escape the danger, and trines join with one another in safe settlements. And soon there after a terrible drought hits the southwest of the North American continent. Tribes abandon their elaborate cities and move into clusters along the Rio Grande River, or just mysteriously disappear all together.

Date of Publication, 21^st century, from the western edge of the North American Continent

The continent we have been reporting on has fulfilled its destiny of breaking into four main continents and two sub continents. Can you name them all ? It is believed that due to ongoing tectonic plate action, further changes re in store for the future of Pangaea.