What caused Gondwana land aka the supercontinent to break up?
New little animation at the link below. The quick answer is plate tectonics. Specifically divergent spreading that would eventually become sea floor spreading. Imagine the Great East African Rift Valley, but on a massive scale. Rising magma puts tensional pressure on the super-continent, and tears it into pieces. The Gondwana super-continent was what would eventually become South America, Africa, Australia and India. They were grouped around what today is Antarctica as a central core, with a number of smaller continental fragments that have by now been smashed onto other continents, and disappeared. Gondwana started to break up in the early Cretaceous, about 130 million years ago. The first split divided the continent into two sections, a western half, made up of Africa and South America, and an eastern half with Antarctica, India and Australia. This was the earliest formation of the Mid-Ocean Ridge. Later in the Cretaceous, maybe 120 million years ago, the next of the fragment, India,
