Geologists can now explain how one of the largest continents ever to exist met its demise. Gondwana was a ‘supercontinent’ that existed between 500 and 180 million years ago. For the past four decades, geologists have debated how Gondwana eventually broke up, developing a multitude of scenarios which can be loosely grouped into two schools of thought — one theory claiming the continent separated into many small plates, and a second theory claiming it broke into just a few large pieces. A new computer model shows that the supercontinent cracked into two pieces, too heavy to hold itself together.