Pangaea was the supercontinent that began breaking apart about 200 million years ago.
Pangaea assembled during the late Paleozoic Era and brought nearly all of Earth’s continental landmasses together. The name was coined by German meteorologist Alfred Wegener, whose 1915 theory of continental drift argued that continents had once formed a single landmass and later moved apart.
The supercontinent was surrounded by a global ocean called Panthalassa. Its breakup began during the Triassic and Jurassic periods, as rifting opened new ocean basins. The northern portion later became associated with Laurasia, while the southern portion became Gondwana, before those landmasses also fragmented.
Pangaea is not the earliest proposed supercontinent: older examples include Rodinia and Nuna. Nor is it the name for only the southern half of a later landmass. Modern plate tectonics explains the movement through Earth’s lithosphere, providing the mechanism that Wegener’s original hypothesis lacked.