Arnaud Broussolle personal website

The question about the acceleration of the supercontinent cycle is still highly debatable. However the paper published in january 2026 in Earth Science Reviews can shed light on the process.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0012825225002818

This paper proposes the first holistic model of the supercontinent cycle, by holistic I mean the complete and sound evolution of the supercontinent cycle but it isn’t a holistic methodology. The paper is based on the methodology developed in my book where I adress the question: How to find the model of the supercontinent cycle?

First of all, there was an other paper published in 2025 that also suggested the acceleration of the Wilson cycle. This acceleration could be linked to the acceleration of the supercontinent cycle as the authors proposed. This idea bring a new evidence since my first paper in 2022. They recovered that the duration of the Wilson seems to diminish towards younger time, going from 400 Myr to 230 Myr to finally 120 Myr.

The paper is interesting when connected to my paper in published in 2026. In this contribution, I propose an alternance of advancing- and retreating modes that can be linked to the assemblies of the different supercontinents. Therefore, these subduction styles switch at the assembly of the Columbia, Rodinia, Gondwana and Pangea supercontinent. In the paper, we hypotheses the subduction style from Pangea to Pangea Proxima inculding the assembly of the Eurasia supercontinent.

In my previous works in 2022 and 2024, the idea of acceleration was only a speculation, without any models to back up the saying. In 2026, a potential model can be associated to the acceleration, leading to consider that the extroversion could be the main mechanism explaining the assembly of supercontinents. When we consider plate tectonics as functioning and that there is only external ocean on Earth, the acceleration of the cycle matches the model of extroversion.

An other paper was just published, which proposes that the supercontinent controls the rythm of the metallogenic record. Interestingly, he observed that the rythm seems to shift and accelerate through time: « Together, these observations indicate that secular mantle cooling drove progressively faster cycles of continental assembly and dispersal as modern-style plate behavior became established. »

Maybe the researcher was not aware of my contribution, as I was not cited. Nevertheless, this is a second evidence that the cycle might accelerate.