About 1.1 billion years ago, what are now El Paso, Texas, and Antarctica appear to have existed side by side, scientists said.
An international team of researchers has found the strongest evidence yet that parts of North America and Antarctica were connected long before the supercontinent Pangaea formed.
"I can go to the Franklin Mountains in West Texas and stand next to what was once part of Coats Land in Antarctica," said Staci Loewy, a geochemist at California State University, Bakersfield, who led the study. "That's so amazing."
Loewy and her colleagues discovered that rocks collected from both locations have the exact same composition of lead isotopes. Earlier analysis showed the rocks to be the exact same age and have the same chemical and geologic properties. The work, published online (ahead of print) in the September issue of the journal Geology, strengthens support for the so-called SWEAT hypothesis, which posits that ancestral North America and East Antarctica were joined in an earlier supercontinent called Rodinia.
