Ground under your feet is slowly rafting you toward a future where continents will crash together again, raising new mountains over the buried bones of current cities.

A closer look

Ground under your feet is slowly rafting you toward a future where continents will crash together again, raising new mountains over the buried bones of current cities. Plate tectonics never stops; continents drift centimeters per year, colliding, splitting, and sliding past each other in a planetary dance that only looks still because our lives are short. About 300 million years ago, most land was fused into a supercontinent called Pangaea. Hundreds of millions of years from now, models suggest new configurations: maybe Amasia near the North Pole or Pangaea Proxima wrapping the equator. Oceans will open and close, climates will warp, and coastlines will redraw beyond recognition. Every earthquake and volcano is a tiny punctuation mark in this immense story. When you stand at a mountain range, you are looking at the frozen splash from ancient collisions, and somewhere below, stresses are already building for the next round.