The world was one, and then the world was not.
Pangaea—the All-Land, the single face
Of continent that held in one great lot
Every shore and mountain, every place
Where life had built its kingdoms on the stone—
Began to crack along its ancient seams
Where the mantle's heat, persistent and alone,
Had pushed against the crust in magma-streams
For a hundred million years.
The rift began
In the Triassic's heart, a slow unzipping
Of the continental skin that ran
From north to south, the mantle's hot blood dripping
Into the crack and filling it with new
Seafloor—basalt that cooled in the salt water
And pushed the halves apart, a centimeter's due
Each year, the patient geological slaughter
Of unity into diversity.
Laurasia to the north, Gondwana south—
The ancient names that the divided verse
Of the continents would carry in the mouth
Of every geologist to come—and between them
The Tethys Sea grew wider, and the warm
And shallow waters of its growing seam
Fed new corals, new fish, the reborn swarm
Of marine life in the expanding space.
But first the breaking. The Carnian rains.
In the midst of the Triassic, every trace
Of the dry and arid world was drowned—the plains
That had been desert for ten million years
Grew suddenly wet: the Carnian Pluvial
Episode, a million years of tears
From skies that had forgotten the alluvial
And the monsoon—and now remembered them.
The cause was volcanic, tectonic, the shift
Of continents and currents—a requiem
For the dry Triassic world, a gift
Of water to a world that had been parched—
But water that arrived too fast, too much,
And ecosystems that had slowly marched
Toward desert-adaptation lost their touch
And struggled in the sudden wet.
This was
The proto-disruption—not a full extinction
But an ecological reshuffling, because
The old arrangements met their contradiction
In the changed climate: what had thrived in drought
Now drowned in rain, and what had waited for
The wet now flourished—and the sorting out
Left Cruros' children weakened at the core
While Avemeta's nimble dinosaurs,
Adapted to the marginal and the changing,
Found opportunity in the Carnian doors
That opened as the old world was rearranging.
The rains subsided. The world resumed its drift.
But the balance had been tilted—Deinos' children
Had gained a foothold from the climate's shift,
And Cruros' dominance, though far from wilted,
Was never quite so absolute again.
And the cracking continued—Pangaea's seams
Grew wider year by year, and then
The isolated continents' separate dreams
Began: each landmass carrying its own
Cargo of creatures into isolation,
Where evolution worked on the local bone
And local climate—each a separate nation
Of life developing its own solutions.
The Tethys Sea became an ocean highway—
A warm equatorial current's contributions
Connecting east and west along the midway
Of the world—and Ichthyos and Nothros swam
Its widening corridors, the marine reptiles
Following the fish across the expanding dam
Of new seafloor spreading in its tiles
Of basalt, mile by mile, between the continents.
The breaking of Pangaea was the seed
Of every future difference—the events
That would give each continent its unique creed
Of creatures: the marsupials of the south,
The placentals of the north, the island birds,
The lemurs of Madagascar—from the mouth
Of this great cracking came the different words
Of life's vocabulary on each shore.
But for now, in the middle Triassic's age,
The breaking was just beginning—nothing more
Than a wider seaway and a wetter stage
For the same cast of characters to play
Their parts upon—Cruros by the river,
Deinos in the uplands, Ichthyos in the bay,
And Cynos in his burrow, a persistent liver
Through every age's change.
Honor the breaking—
For the world that was one had to become many
Before the richness of the many-making
Could fill the earth with more life than any
Single continent could hold—the division
Was not a wound but a multiplication,
Not a loss but a widening of the vision
Of what life could become in separation.