Rodinia

In the geological history of Earth, Rodinia (from Russian родина (rodina) 'motherland, birthplace') was a Mesoproterozoic and Neoproterozoic supercontinent that assembled 1.26–0.90 billion years ago (GaTooltip gigaannus) and broke up 750–633 million years ago (Ma). Valentine & Moores (1970) were probably the first to recognise a Precambrian supercontinent, which they named "Pangaea I". It was renamed "Rodinia" by McMenamin & McMenamin (1990), who also were the first to produce a plate reconstruction and propose a temporal framework for the supercontinent. Rodinia formed at c. 1.23 Ga by accretion and collision of fragments produced by breakup of an older supercontinent, Columbia, assembled by global-scale 2.0–1.8 Ga collisional events. Rodinia broke up in the Neoproterozoic, with its continental fragments reassembled to form Pannotia 633–573 Ma. In contrast with Pannotia, little is known about Rodinia's configuration and geodynamic history. Paleomagnetic evidence provides some clues to the paleolatitude of individual pieces of the Earth's crust, but not to their longitude, which geologists have pieced together by comparing similar geologic features, often now widely dispersed. The extreme cooling of the global climate around 717–635 Ma (the so-called Snowball Earth of the Cryogenian period) and the rapid evolution of primitive life during the subsequent Ediacaran and Cambrian periods are thought to have been triggered by the breaking up of Rodinia or to a slowing down of tectonic processes.