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Pangaea splits
Pangaea was the supercontinent in which all the land on Earth was joined in a single mass, and it began to break apart around 201 million years ago. The Central Atlantic Magmatic Province is one of the largest known volcanic events, with basalt spread across what are now four continents. The eruptions coincide with the Triassic–Jurassic mass extinction, and their CO₂ release is now regarded as the most likely cause. The rift basins formed — Newark, Hartford, Culpeper — filled with lake sediments that give an unusually precise astronomically calibrated timescale for the whole period.
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