Since the Neoarchean, major continents have undergone multiple times of assemblage to form a supercontinent, and later broken apart.This process seems to be cyclic, forming the largest time-space scale of “supercontinent cycle” in earth's history.Though there is a consensus that the assemblage of a supercontinent was mainly formed by global-scale plate convergence and orogeny,the geodynamic mechanism responsible for the supercontinent fragmentation is still debated by the geoscience community.There are currently two main schools of thought, namely,the rising mantle plumes (i.e.Bottom-up) and deep subduction (i.e.Top-down).This paper reviews the main geological observations,geodynamic numerical simulation results,and model predictions of these two schools of thought, and discusses the evolution and relationship between the bottom-up and top-down processes based on the distribution characteristics of ancient large dyke swarms of the terrestrial planets and the evolution metamorphism over time,and proposes future research perspectives on this topic.