7 ms·
Map Shows How a Location Has Changed over the Past 750M Years
- b2ccb2 7y agoLink to the actual interactive map: http://dinosaurpictures.org/ancient-earth#0 http://dinosaurpictures.org/ancient-earth#0
- homonculus1 7y agoThis is the real link. Do not bother with the junk website posted above.
- bluedevil2k 7y agoOne of the interesting things I kind of knew and this map confirmed: If you put in Austin, TX and look at the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods, you'll see Austin was oceanfront property for tens of millions of years. I-35 was built right on this beachfront area and acts as the dividing line between ancient oceanbed and ancient land. The result of this is that building an in-ground pool is much cheaper if you live east of 35 than if you live west of 35.
- parasanti 7y agoI was just looking at the same thing. Also another bit of info...if you live east of 35, you only need 10 acres for an agriculture exception. West, you need 15 acres. Those pesky rocks.
- duxup 7y agoI belive the constant change that occurred in N. America with a shallow sea coming and going is often credited for N. America's wide variety of dinosaurs finds.
- Shivetya 7y agopretty much why a big industry in middle Georgia is sand, the railroads built to support that industry serve pecan farmers now; there is still sand being sold. So two notes. 1) It would be nice to track glaciers, they used to be truly massive during past history and it would be interesting to see them recede and more land being above water level 2) Going the other way would be interest too, what would the earth look like in 100,000 or million years?
- bluedevil2k 7y agoRegarding 2, I think the landmass location would be predictable, but the sea levels wouldn't.
- trhway 7y agohttps://kottke.org/16/10/how-the-cretaceous-coastline-of-north-america-affects-us-presidential-elections https://kottke.org/16/10/how-the-cretaceous-coastline-of-nor... "How the Cretaceous coastline of North America affects US presidential elections ... Along that ancient coastline of a shallow sea, plankton with carbonate skeletons lived and died in massive numbers, accumulating into large chalk formations on the bottom of the sea. When the sea level dropped and the sea drained through the porous chalk, rich bands of soil were left right along the former coastline. When that area was settled and farmed in the 19th century, that rich soil was perfect for growing cotton. And cotton production was particularly profitable, so slaves were heavily used in those areas."
- jhayward 7y agoThe Balcones Escarpment [1]. I used to tell people that I lived on the first hill in the Texas hill country. [1] https://www.texasmonthly.com/the-culture/texas-primer-the-balcones-escarpment/ https://www.texasmonthly.com/the-culture/texas-primer-the-ba...
- arethuza 7y ago"On us who saw these phenomena for the first time, the impression made will not easily be forgotten... The mind seemed to grow giddy looking so far into the abyss of time..." John Playfair on the work of his friend the geologist James Hutton who first realised the incredible age of geological features. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Hutton https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Hutton Of course, Playfair lived in Edinburgh - "this dream in masonry and living rock".
- Ididntdothis 7y agoIt will take a few million years to make them but time lapse videos of these changes will be super cool.
- iamasuperuser 7y agoThis map will become very useful when Time Travel tourism takes place!
- Tepix 7y agoWhen calculating your target coordinates for your time travels don't forget to account for the motion of the Sun around the center of the Milky Way. This will have killed many time travellers in the future's past.
- brixon 7y agoI would assume the Milky Way is moving too.
- pdonis 7y agoMotion is relative. Without the blueprints for the time travel device we have no way of knowing what state of motion will count as "rest" for the device.
- ars 7y ago> Motion is relative. Circular motion is not, it is absolute. (Although the center of the circle may also be moving at the same time, and that motion would be relative.)
- pdonis 7y ago> Circular motion is not, it is absolute. What is absolute is not circular motion, but proper acceleration and vorticity of a particular congruence of worldlines. But you can describe those phenomena perfectly well in a reference frame in which, for example, a person riding along on a rotating platform is at rest. The reference frame will not be inertial, but that does not mean it is any less valid. For that matter, we routinely describe phenomena on Earth using a reference frame in which the entire Earth is at rest, not just its center; that is perfectly valid as well.
- mc32 7y agoSeems 20 million years ago there was a lot more land on most continents except for South America... but Africa, Europe and Asia (look at Indonesia) had much more lands d North America had no Hudson Bay!
- theferalrobot 7y agoIt would be cool if they showed estimates for the next 750 million years
- growlist 7y agoAs one can imagine, oil and gas companies find this type of technology useful as it can highlight unprospected areas that were once nearby what are now well known oil fields. As might be expected, commercial versions offer far more detail and control than the website referenced. I worked with this a few years back (no connection, just thought it might be of interest): https://www.paleogis.com/products/paleoglobe/ https://www.paleogis.com/products/paleoglobe/
- Tepix 7y agoIt's also potentially interesting for archaeologists searching for remains of ancient civilizations.
- amdavidson 7y agoHow could that be the case? The map for 66M years ago (predating the human fossil record) looks functionally identical. http://dinosaurpictures.org/ancient-earth#66 http://dinosaurpictures.org/ancient-earth#66
- bluedevil2k 7y agoWhat? The Atlantic Ocean is tiny, the Pacific Ocean is huge. The Arabian peninsula hasn't broken away from Africa, North and South America aren't even connected, India is a huge island in the middle of the ocean.
- Merrill 7y agoIf you track Cancun from 200 million years ago, it shows the Gulf of Mexico opening up as the Yucatan block rotates clockwise. The Florida platform stays pretty much stationary. This likely accounts for why there are no oil wells on the Florida platform south of the panhandle.
- tim333 7y agoI see Britain also historically couldn't make it's mind up about being attached to Europe: 200 million years ago - joined 170 separated 66 England seems to have left Scotland and NI and sunk 20 rejoined 0 separated
- Numberwang 7y agoAnyone know of a good continental drift animation/video?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- mlindner 7y agoWTF? In the map of current day they don't even include the great lakes. That was a major thing that happened recently with the carving out of the great lakes from the glaciers pulling back. The fact they don't even include them in the modern era shows how flawed this is.
- typpo 7y agoUnfortunately that's how the data is provided [1]. Maybe because the Great Lakes were carved by geologically recent glaciation, and the model is built off tectonic plate movement. A writeup of the methodology is available if you're interested. [2] [1] https://www.earthbyte.org/paleomap-paleoatlas-for-gplates/ https://www.earthbyte.org/paleomap-paleoatlas-for-gplates/ [2] https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-q0WIa7ofISFHyBe4UxvN8DIPs82SPmS/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-q0WIa7ofISFHyBe4UxvN8DIPs8...
- jbattle 7y agoThe formation of the great lakes was an eye-blink ago on the scale of this map. They are only about four times as old as the great pyramid (woah)
- mncharity 7y agoThe maps are hand-painted representations of the various ages. On the earlier maps, there was a lot of care, but also unavoidably a lot of handwaving. For the 0 Ma map, I don't know if Scotese had a particular time in mind? It looks like modern coastlines, which means an interglacial period. A 100 ky average would be more glacial - the Boston coast would stick out more. I suspect he simply used the current coast. The absence of the Great Lakes, suggests it's not the current interglacial. A duration-weighted average of say the last 1 My of 10-ish interglacials might fade the Lakes to invisibility. So perhaps it's an eye blink of averaged interglacials, or a recent but previous interglacial, or a map rule like "don't include transient features", or a consistency of approach (eg, disregarding flavors of data unavailable for earlier maps, except for the coastline), or ... ?
- typpo 7y agoHi all, I built this using an existing model called PALEOMAP [1]. Geologists use desktop software called GPlates that defines a "rotation file" format describing the movement of tectonic plates. I wrote code that uses this file to reverse the rotation of latlng coordinates at arbitrary moments in time. You used to be able to enter an exact address on this site, but the server would overload under heavy traffic as the rotation calculations are CPU intensive (geocoding is also expensive). I solved this problem by precomputing a grid of transformations across 26 out of the 91 available moments in time and reducing the geocoding resolution to about 200,000 cities. [1] https://www.earthbyte.org/paleomap-paleoatlas-for-gplates/ https://www.earthbyte.org/paleomap-paleoatlas-for-gplates/
- jamesrcole 7y agoThat's a really cool map. I'd love to be able to click a button and have it show the locations of (say) major world cities, so that I can see surprising adjacencies. So if I look up the location of my hometown 300 million years ago, I can see if there's any places it is far away from today that it was actually much closer to then. It'd help contextualise the location you've entered.
- mncharity 7y agoPerhaps a game? Perhaps of minimizing inter-city walking/swimming/flying physical travel, for time travelers whose position when time traveling is anchored to the plate? So "Start at city A. ... Now, fly to Mumbai, and ride it time-forward across the Tethys Sea to Asia. Then fly to D, time-backwards to Gondwana, and fly to E (goal). Distance flown: N km. Distance drifted: N km. Time traveled: N Ma." Note that the existing app can simultaneously show more than one city. I missed that at first.
- mncharity 7y agoFyi: Could not resolve location for "Banjar Bangli, Bali, ID", "We haven't tracked its tectonic plate that far into the past - try a later year!", even for "first hominids". EDIT: Oh, I see. It does exist for 0 Ma. Perhaps add a 0 Ma "present" item to the "Jump to" pulldown? <strike>Perhaps prune cities for which only 0 Ma data exists?</strike> Random thoughts. Thanks for your thing.
- baalimago 7y agoSuddenly, global warming feels very minor.
- thaumaturgy 7y agoWhich is unfortunate, because the opposite is true: over the last few hundred million years, the Earth's climate has never changed more rapidly than it is right now, with the exception of the K-T asteroid impact.
- benploni 7y agoDeep time is one of humanity's big discoveries: there's a LOT of history, and the vast majority of it was nothing like today. All your shorelines, mountains, political boundaries, and holy lands are just coincidences of this moment in time; none are ancient and none will last.
- welder 7y agoPreviously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17690693 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17690693 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17286770 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17286770
- dghughes 7y agoNova Scotia is amazingly stable back to 200 million years ago.