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
Karoo Ice Age Karoo Ice Age The Karoo Ice Age, more commonly referred to as the Late Paleozoic Ice Age, from 360–260 million years ago (Mya) was the second major ice age of the Phanerozoic Eon. It is named after the tillite (Dwyka Group) found in the Karoo Basin of South Africa, where evidence for this ice age was first clearly identified in the 19th century. The tectonic assembly of the continents of Euramerica (later with the Uralian orogeny, into Laurasia) and Gondwana into Pangaea, in the Hercynian-Alleghany Orogeny, made a major continental land mass within the Antarctic region, and the closure of