Pangaea believed to be the main cause of the shrinking of lysocline areas. The third cause of this extinction event that can be attributed to northern Pangaea is the beginnings of anoxic ocean environments, or oceans with very low oxygen concentrations. The mix of anoxic oceans and ocean acidification due to metal loading led to increasingly acidic oceans, which ultimately led to the extinction of benthic species. Pangaea Pangaea or Pangea () was a supercontinent that existed during the late Paleozoic and early Mesozoic eras. It assembled from earlier continental units approximately 335 million years ago, and it began to break
Matterhorn plate, a small continent which broke up from Africa before the Alpine orogeny. For this reason the Matterhorn has been popularized as an African mountain. The Austroalpine nappes are mostly common in the Eastern Alps. The Swiss explorer and geologist Horace-Bénédict de Saussure, inspired by the view of the Matterhorn, anticipated the modern theories of geology: The formation of the Matterhorn (and the whole Alpine range) started with the break-up of the Pangaea continent 200 million years ago into Laurasia (containing Europe) and Gondwana (containing Africa). While the rocks constituting the nearby Monte Rosa remained in Laurasia, the rocks constituting