“So when you form a supercontinent in our climate models, you end up with dry interiors,” Lee Kump told me. “And so they’re kind of a noncontributor to the global carbon cycle at that point because there’s no water to weather the rocks, and so, yeah, you could imagine that volcanic eruptions at a time of high continentality like Pangaea would break the regulator for CO2. Suddenly you have an unabated increase in carbon dioxide.”
