Rodinia

In geology, Rodinia (from the Russian родина, "rodina", meaning "motherland") is the name of a supercontinent, a continent which contained most or all of Earth's landmass. According to plate tectonic reconstructions, Rodinia existed between 1100 and 750 million years ago, in the Neoproterozoic era.

In contrast with Pangaea, the last supercontinent about 300 million years ago, 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 700 million years ago (the so called snowball Earths of the Cryogenian period) and the rapid evolution of primitive life during the subsequent Ediacaran and Cambrian periods are often thought to have been triggered by the breaking up of Rodinia.