Permian have in part caused the widespread extinctions of marine species at the end of the period by severely reducing shallow coastal areas preferred by many marine organisms. During the Permian, all the Earth's major landmasses were collected into a single supercontinent known as Pangaea. Pangaea straddled the equator and extended toward the poles, with a corresponding effect on ocean currents in the single great ocean ("Panthalassa", the "universal sea"), and the Paleo-Tethys Ocean, a large ocean that existed between Asia and Gondwana. The Cimmeria continent rifted away from Gondwana and drifted north to Laurasia, causing the Paleo-Tethys Ocean to shrink.
PANGAEA (data library) Marine Environmental Sciences (MARUM), Bremen in Germany. The system is used by various international research projects from public funding as data repository and by the World Data Center for Marine Environmental Sciences (WDC-MARE) as long-term archive. The system was initially developed since 1987 and is operational on the Internet since 1995. The MediaWiki software is used to operate a wiki as PANGAEA manual and reference. PANGAEA is also listed in re3data.org. PANGAEA (data library) PANGAEA - Data Publisher for Earth & Environmental Science is a digital data library and a data publisher for earth system science. Data can be georeferenced