thumb|330x330px|Map of the world at the Carboniferous-Permian boundary (~ 300 million years ago) showing Cathaysia (pink) Cathaysia was a microcontinent or a group of terranes that rifted off Gondwana during the Late Paleozoic. They mostly correspond to the modern territory of China, historically referred to in Europe as Cathay, which was split into the North China and South China blocks.
thumb|330x330px|Map of the world at the Carboniferous-Permian boundary (~ 300 million years ago) showing Cathaysia (pink) Cathaysia was a microcontinent or a group of terranes that rifted off Gondwana during the Late Paleozoic. They mostly correspond to the modern territory of China, historically referred to in Europe as Cathay, which was split into the North China and South China blocks.
== Terminology == The terms "Cathaysia", "Cathaysialand" and "Cathaysia Terrane" have been used by various authors for different continental blocks or terranes and assemblages thereof. During the Devonian, the South China and Indochina continents had separated from Gondwana and they collided during the Carboniferous to finally form a superterrane in the Permian. "Cathaysia" has been used for some or all of the constellations involved in this tectonic journey. For example, in South China formed from the amalgamation of the "Yangtse and Cathaysia Blocks", whilst groups North China, South China, and Indochina into the "Cathaysian terranes".
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).