Rodinia
The supercontinent whose break-up froze the planet
See it on the timeline →In depth
Rodinia assembled through the Grenville orogeny around 1.1 billion years ago — the same mountains that today form the basement rock of parts of southern Norway and Sweden. Its break-up from around 750 million years ago is closely tied to the Cryogenian Snowball Earth: rifting exposes large volumes of basalt in the tropics, where weathering is fastest, and basalt weathering locks up CO₂. With solar output still below today's, the climate was vulnerable. Rodinia is also the setting in which shallow, nutrient-rich seas expanded greatly — the environment in which animal life was about to appear.
For children
The continents gathered once more into a single landmass we call Rodinia. When it began to split apart, enormous amounts of fresh rock were exposed, which reacted with the air and soaked up CO₂. Without the greenhouse gas, Earth grew so cold it turned into a snowball.
Connects to
Part of Terra Saga — the story of Earth on a timeline. terrasaga.org