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To start with, Nield shows how the idea of "vanished worlds" and "sunken continents" has functioned in different cultures. It's by no means a complete account (the best known vanished world of Western tradition, Atlantis, gets only a passing mention) but still covers a variety of myths and crackpot theories about imaginary vanished lands, including Mu of the Theosophy and Kumarikkandam from the mythical perhistory of Southern India's Tamils. This cultural account fills much of the first part of ''Supercontinent'' and is an excellent way to excite readers' curiosity about the real vanished worlds.
Vignettes of the geologists and geophysicists who ventured into the abyss of Earth's distant past are used to bring life to the models. It's a fairly common approach to popular science, and applied successfully if over-enthusiastically in Bill Bryson's best-selling [[''A Short History of Nearly Everything]]'', but here it works very well by presenting not just the ideas, but the people who came up with the ideas, and the spirit of time that influenced them. We meet the great Victorians (clearly made from sterner stuff than we are); learn about the political roots of the conflict between the continental European and American schools of Earth science; and chart the development of the astonishing idea that claimed that continents actually move horizontally. Thus, we learn not only about the current understanding, but about the way the Earth sciences are done - and were done in the past; and by extension, about how science is done in general.
In fact, ''Supercontinent'' is as much a hymn to scientific understanding of our world in general as a presentation of the current state of knowledge. Ted Nield writes as much about the supercontinent of science as about the supercontinents of Earth's crust. He's also not afraid of widening his scope considerably to describe whatever might be of relevance (for example the current global climate system gets a decent summary because it's needed to understand how other climate systems could have worked in the past, with continental masses distributed differently).
