New Pangaea

• New Pangea

New Pangaea

1. (ecology) A notional supercontinent created through global travel and commerce, and the resulting worldwide dispersal of alien species.
   • 2001 March, Michael L. Rosenzweig, “The four questions: What does the introduction of exotic species do to diversity?”, in Evolutionary Ecology Research‎, volume 3, number 3, pages 361–367:

     The New Pangaea’s threat to global species diversity disappeared because we looked at the species–area curve among provinces. But the same curve predicts the effect of area-loss itself.

   • 2003 October 7, Carl Zimmer, “The New Pangaea”, in Science‎:

     According to the Olden paper, in the New Pangaea many species will become more uniform genetically.

   • [2014, Elizabeth Kolbert, chapter 10, in The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, Henry Holt and Company:

     By transporting Asian species to North America, and North American species to Australia, and Australian species to Africa, and European species to Antarctica, we are, in effect, reassembling the world into one enormous supercontinent—what biologists sometimes refer to as the New Pangaea.]

2. (geology) Novopangaea, a hypothetical future supercontinent.