Climate of Pangea, earth millions of years ago (hot, temperatures, day)

[Heat lover]

This is a new topic that I haven't seen in discussions on this forum. I hope everyone here knows that Pangea is the name given to the super landmass on earth dated hundreds of millions of years ago, before movements from plate tectonics split it apart to gradually form the modern day continents. From the model of Pangea as we know, Eurasia, Africa, and Australia seem to have had climates that can be classified as either polar or subpolar. As seen on the map, those modern-day continents used to be connected to Antarctica, so most likely they all had a polar climate.
Furthermore, evolutionary studies postulates that Spermatophyte, i.e. seeded plants, evolved 319 millions years ago, and Conifers 300 million years ago (Spermatophyte - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia). If Pangea was accurately modeled for its time period, Eurasia, Australia, and parts of Africa would have been primarily occupied by conifers, given their high latitudes. Any thoughts about the climates?

[nei]

My guess is that the low latitude areas would be drier than today since less of it is exposed to ocean.

[Asagi]

Conifers are not strictly 'high latitude' plants. In fact, the remnants of the more primitive conifers, the Araucaria (41 species) family, are mainly distributed in the tropics and subtropics. A primitive Gymnosperm (seed plant) family, the Cycads, are also mostly distributed in the tropics and subtropics. Based off what I've read, flowering plants were not widespread until the late Cretaceous, so Gymnosperms probably dominated at all latitudes.

[ilovemycomputer90]

Aren't there a lot of conifers driving down I-95 in Georgia?

[deneb78]

I'd say the areas furthest away from the oceans in Pangaea had an extreme continental climate that was very dry even near the equator. I wouldn't be surprised if it got up to 40C during the day and below freezing at night.

[cjg5]

Interesting topic! I agree that the interior probably had high extremes year round. Coastal areas probably had wetter, more moderated climates.

[nei]

I found this on an internet search:

http://www.ipgp.fr/~fluteau/UIA/arti...ea-climate.pdf

they used a climate model used to model today climate on Pangea. Not sure how accurate it is, considering how poorly known the inputs are. Likely a bit of "garbage in, garbage out". Still interesting and might give a good idea of what it could be?

It's a bit of a hard read, and I only skimmed it. I thought the most interesting part was in Figure 2, where they showed the temperature results and their discussion in 3.1.

Looks like the equatorial areas are incredibly hot, with mean summer temperatures up to 40°C! This leads to a strong monsoon climate, leading to heavy rains following the hot season. The subtropics are fairly dry, and some of the higher latitudes are quite cold.

[Weatherfan2]

I'd have thunk it would be much like a desert around the subtropical zones, and the idea of a monsoonal season in the central parts makes some sense. Real extremes of temperature certainly seem very likely such as those in central Asia. The most comfortable places to live being on the coast somewhere at the 30-40th parallel perhaps.