Gondwana

n (Geological Science) one of the two ancient supercontinents produced by the first split of the even larger supercontinent Pangaea about 200 million years ago, comprising chiefly what are now Africa, South America, Australia, Antarctica, and the Indian subcontinent[C19: from Gondwana region in central north India, where the rock series was originally found]

Gond·wa·na·land

(gŏnd-wä′nə-lănd′) A supercontinent of the Southern Hemisphere comprising the landmasses that currently correspond to India, Australia, Antarctica, and South America. According to the theory of plate tectonics, Gondwanaland formed at the end of the Precambrian Eon and broke up in the middle of the Mesozoic Era. Compare Laurasia.Did You Know? Sometimes a suggested solution to a scientific problem can raise more questions than it answers. So it was with Austrian geologist Eduard Suess's hypothesis explaining why identical groups of fossil plants occur in India, South America, southern Africa, Australia, and Antarctica. These plants, known as the Glossopteris flora, had seeds that were too large to have blown across wide oceans. In 1885 Suess proposed that the plant fossils were common to all of the landmasses because the landmasses were actually connected when the plants first developed, eventually breaking apart into separate continents. Suess named this huge landmass Gondwanaland, after a region of central India called Gondwana. Few believed Suess's idea because most people could not see what would cause such a giant supercontinent to break apart. In the early 1900s, Alfred Wegener, a German meteorologist, noticed other kinds of evidence for Gondwanaland, including similarities in animal fossils, rock types, and marks left by glaciers across the continents of the Southern Hemisphere. Wegener used this evidence to propose the idea of continental drift, which says that the continents are always moving toward or away from one another. But it wasn't until the 1960s that Wegener's ideas or the concept of Gondwanaland were finally accepted, when the theory of plate tectonics was put forward to explain how the internal workings of the Earth could cause continents to move about.

Thesaurus

Noun

Gondwanaland - a hypothetical continent that (according to plate tectonic theory) broke up later into India and Australia and Africa and South America and Antarcticasouthern hemisphere - the hemisphere to the south of the equator

Gondwanaland

enUK

Gondwanaland

(gŏnd'wä`nəlănd'): see continental driftcontinental drift,
geological theory that the relative positions of the continents on the earth's surface have changed considerably through geologic time. Though first proposed by American geologist Frank Bursley Taylor in a lecture in 1908, the first detailed theory of
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Gondwanaland

(named after the historical region in middle India), a hypothetical continent that, in the opinion of many scientists, existed in the southern hemisphere in the Paleozoic era and partially in the Mesozoic era. It included a large part of contemporary South America (to the east of the Andes), Africa (without the Atlas Mountains), the island of Madagascar, Arabia, the Indian peninsula (south of the Himalayas), Australia (to the west of the mountain ranges in the east), and possibly a large portion of Antarctica. The proponents of Gondwanaland’s existence feel that in the Proterozoic era and the Upper Carboniferous period, extensive glaciation developed on the continent. Traces of Upper Carboniferous glaciation are evident in Central and South Africa, in the southern part of South America, and in India and Australia. During the Carboniferous and Permian periods, unique flora of the temperate and cold belts developed in Gondwanaland. This flora was characterized by an abundance of glossopteres and equisetums.

Gondwanaland began to break up in the Mesozoic era and by the end of the Cretaceous period and the beginning of the Paleogene epoch, the modern continents and their regions had separated. Many geologists feel that the breakup of Gondwanaland was a consequence of the horizontal separation of its modern parts, a fact confirmed by the data of paleomagnetism. However, instead of separation some scientists have proposed the collapse of individual areas of Gondwanaland that previously were situated on the site of the present-day Indian and southern Atlantic oceans.

REFERENCES

Mazarovich, A. N. Osnovy regional’noi geologii materikov. Part 2: luzhnye materiki, okeany i obshchie zakonomernosti razvitiia struktury zemnoi kory. [Moscow] 1952.
Gignoux, M. Stratigraficheskaia geologiia. Moscow, 1952. (Translated from French.)
Problemy peremeshcheniia materikov. Moscow, 1963. (Collection of articles; translated from English and German.)
Problemy paleoklimatologii. Trudy simpoziuma. Moscow, 1968. (Translated from English.)

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[gän′dwän·ə‚land] (geology) Gondwana

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REFERENCES

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Words related to Gondwanaland

noun a hypothetical continent that (according to plate tectonic theory) broke up later into India and Australia and Africa and South America and Antarctica

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