Australia’s Place in the Pangean Puzzle

While Pangea is often thought of as a single mass, Australia occupied a very specific and influential “corner” of this supercontinent. During the era of Pangea, Australia wasn’t the dry, red centre we know today; it was a cold, coastal frontier of the world.

The “Bottom Right” Corner

On the map of Pangea, Australia was tucked into the far southeastern edge.

• The Neighbors: Australia was “zipped” tightly against Antarctica to its south and India to its west.
• The Tethys Frontier: Its northern and eastern coastlines (which would eventually become our modern-day Top End and East Coast) faced the vast, open Tethys Ocean.

From Ice Age to Greenhouse

Australia’s climate during Pangea’s reign underwent a dramatic transformation:

• The Big Freeze: At the start of Pangea (the Carboniferous and Permian periods), Australia was located much closer to the South Pole. Much of the Australian continent was covered in massive ice sheets. If you stood in what is now the Sydney Basin 280 million years ago, you would have seen glaciers calving into a cold sea.
• The Great Warming: As Pangea drifted and the global climate shifted, Australia began to thaw. By the time Pangea was fully formed and beginning to break (the Triassic), Australia was covered in vast, swampy forests of Glossopteris ferns, which eventually compressed to form the massive coal seams found today in the Bowen and Sydney Basins.

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Australia’s Pangean “Birthmarks”

We can still see the physical evidence of the Pangea era in the Australian landscape today:

Evidence	Location	Pangean Connection
Glacial Striations	Hallett Cove, SA	Scratches in the rock made by glaciers when Australia was at the South Pole.
Coal Seams	Hunter Valley, NSW	The remains of lush forests that grew in the warming Pangean climate.
Labyrinthodont Fossils	St Peters, NSW	Giant amphibian fossils showing how life spread across the joined landmass.
The Great Dividing Range	Eastern Australia	The roots of these mountains began forming as tectonic forces buckled the edge of Pangea.

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The Great Exit: Australia’s Journey Begins

As Pangea began to rift apart approximately 175 million years ago, the “northern” continents (Laurasia) broke away first.

Australia stayed attached to the southern chunk—Gondwana—for another 100 million years. This is why Australia has a “double history”:

1. The Pangean Chapter: We shared life and geology with the entire world.
2. The Gondwanan Chapter: We were separated from the north but still shared a home with South America and Antarctica.
3. The Solo Journey: Our final “break” from Antarctica 50 million years ago, which turned Australia into the isolated biological laboratory it is today.