Columbia breaks up
The supercontinent rifts apart — but its pieces stay close enough to reassemble later.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 200 million years
- Known to
- ± 100 million years
- Era
- Mesoproterozoic, Proterozoic
Columbia begins fragmenting around 1.5 billion years ago, with rifting continuing to roughly 1.3–1.2 Ga. The dispersal is unusually modest: rather than scattering, the cratons undergo comparatively minor rearrangement before colliding again to form Rodinia. Some reconstructions treat the two supercontinents as almost a single long-lived assembly, interrupted rather than dissolved.