Rodinia

Rodinia (from the Russian "Родина", ródina, meaning "The Motherland") is a Neoproterozoic supercontinent that was assembled 1.13–1.071 billion years ago and broke up 750–600 million years ago.Valentine & Moores 1970 were probably the first to recognise a Precambrian supercontinent, which they named 'Pangaea I'. It was renamed 'Rodinia' by McMenamin & McMenamin 1990 who also were the first to produce a reconstruction and propose a temporal framework for the supercontinent.

Rodinia formed at c. 1.071 Ga by accretion and collision of fragments produced by breakup of an older supercontinent, Columbia, assembled by global-scale 2.02–1.82 Ga collisional events.

Rodinia broke up in the Neoproterozoic with its continental fragments reassembled to form Pannotia 620–555 million years ago. In contrast with Pannotia, little is known yet about the exact configuration and geodynamic history of Rodinia. Paleomagnetic evidence provides some clues to the paleolatitude of individual pieces of the Earth's crust, but not to their longitude, which geologists have pieced together by comparing similar geologic features, often now widely dispersed.

The extreme cooling of the global climate around 717–650 million years ago (the so-called Snowball Earth of the Cryogenian Period) and the rapid evolution of primitive life during the subsequent Ediacaran and Cambrian periods are thought to have been triggered by the breaking up of Rodinia or to a slowing down of tectonic processes.

The idea that a supercontinent existed in the early Neoproterozoic arose in the 1970s, when geologists determined that orogens of this age exist on virtually all cratons. Examples are the Grenville orogeny in North America and the Dalslandian orogeny in Europe.

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