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According to a new model, all land will crash into a supercontinent in 250 million years, causing global warming and driving mammals to extinction.

Reptile-like animals evolved into mammals approximately 250 million years ago. A group of scientists is now forecasting that mammals may have only 250 million years left.

The researchers created a virtual simulation of our future planet, comparable to models that forecast human-caused global warming over the next century. The new study projected considerably further into the future by using data on the migration of continents around the earth as well as shifts in the chemical makeup of the atmosphere.

According to Alexander Farnsworth, a paleoclimate scientist at the University of Bristol who led the research, the world may become too hot for any mammals, including humans, to exist on land. The researchers discovered that three factors will cause the climate to become lethal: a brighter sun, a shift in the geography of the continents, and rises in carbon dioxide.

"It's a triple whammy that becomes unsurvivable," explained Dr. Farnsworth. On Monday, he and his colleagues published their findings in the journal Nature Geoscience.

For decades, scientists have attempted to predict the fate of life on Earth. Astronomers predict that our sun will gradually brighten and engulf the Earth in 7.6 billion years.

But life is unlikely to last that long. As the sun's energy levels rise, the planet's atmosphere heats up, causing more water to evaporate from the oceans and continents. Because water vapor is a powerful greenhouse gas, it will trap even more heat. In two billion years, it may become hot enough to boil the oceans.

To divert himself from the pandemic, Dr. Farnsworth turned his attention to the future of Earth in 2020. He came upon a study that predicted how continents would travel across the world in the far future.

Earth's landmasses have clashed to form supercontinents, which have then torn apart over time. Pangea, the last supercontinent, flourished between 330 million and 170 million years ago. According to the findings, a new supercontinent called Pangea Ultima would arise around the equator 250 million years from now.

Dr. Farnsworth's principal research is the construction of ancient Earth models in order to reconstruct former climates. But he felt it would be fun to utilize his models to see how life might be on Pangea Ultima. The climate he ended up in surprised him.

This world was very toasty," he commented

A computer model of Pangea Ultima, a supercontinent said to have formed 250 million years ago, was produced by researchers. They discovered that the majority of the landmass may endure dangerously high temperatures.

Dr. Farnsworth sought the help of Christopher Scotese, a retired geophysicist from the University of Texas who created the Pangea Ultima model, and other experts to perform more precise simulations of that far future, tracing the movement of the atmosphere over the oceans, the supercontinent, and its mountains.

"They did quite a lot, which I'm quite impressed by," said Hannah Davis, an earth systems scientist at the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences who was not involved in the study.

The researchers discovered that Pangea Ultima will be significantly hotter than today's continents under a variety of geological and atmospheric conditions. The sun is one of the causes of the abrupt change. The energy released by the sun grows by 1% every 110 million years.

However, the supercontinent will exacerbate the situation. For starters, land heats up faster than the water. There will be a large interior where temperatures can skyrocket when the continents are forced together into one massive behemoth.

Pangea Ultima's topography, which will contain enormous swaths of flat land far from the ocean, will also have an impact on the climate. Rainwater and carbon dioxide react with minerals on the sides of mountains and hills on today's Earth, which are subsequently taken out to sea and sink to the sea floor. As a result, carbon dioxide is constantly removed from the atmosphere. However, when Pangea Ultima settles on Earth, the conveyor belt will slow down.

The model predicts that if Pangea Ultima behaves like previous supercontinents, it will be riddled with volcanoes that emit carbon dioxide. Volcanoes may emit massive surges of carbon dioxide over thousands of years due to turbulent motions of molten rock deep inside the Earth – blasts of greenhouse gases that will cause temperatures to skyrocket.

Humans are currently warming the world by emitting more than 40 billion tons of carbon from fossil fuels each year. If global warming continues unabated, researchers fear that a number of species may become extinct, while mankind will be unable to endure the heat and humidity in broad parts of the earth.

Dr. Farnsworth and his colleagues decided on Pangea Ultima that things will likely get much worse for animals like us. The researchers discovered that nearly the entire Pangea Ultima might quickly become too hot for any mammal to survive. They could become extinct as a result of a mass extinction.

Dr. Farnsworth conceded that a few mammals might be able to survive in refuges on the outskirts of Pangea Ultima. "Some areas in the northern and southern peripheries could be survivable," he stated.

Nonetheless, he was convinced that mammals will lose their dominance during the next 65 million years. They could be replaced by coldblooded reptiles that can withstand the heat.

According to Wolfgang Kiessling, a climate scientist from the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany who was not involved in the study, the model failed to account for a component that could be critical for mammalian survival: the progressive drop in heat escaping from the Earth's interior. This decrease may result in fewer volcanic eruptions and less carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere.

There will be fewer volcanic eruptions and less carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

"Mammalian survival may be slightly longer than modeled," he speculated — perhaps 200 million years, give or take.

The discovery, according to Eric Wolf, a planetary climate scientist at the University of Colorado who was not involved in the current study, could one day help us detect life on distant worlds. As sophisticated satellite telescopes are used to spy at planets in other solar systems, scientists may be able to measure their continental layouts to estimate what forms of life might survive there.

"We're trying to prepare ourselves for the many worlds we are going to see," stated Dr. Wolf

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