Have
you ever imagined how the Earth looked million years ago? Have you wondered how
it has been changed with the time? If so, you can browse the latest interactive map. The map
will let you know the political boundaries of today as well as 750 million
years ago.
As
an example let’s see what National Mall in Washington D.C. was known about 240
million years ago. It was a piece of land located in the supercontinent known as
Pangea. The National Mall
was almost adjacent to Mauritania during the Early Triassic
Epoch. It wasn’t a land which was separated from the Northwest African
country by the vast waters of the Atlantic Ocean.
Ian
Webster who is the curator of the largest digital
dinosaur database in the world is the mastermind of the millennia spanning visualization
tool, Ancient Earth.
Webster grabbed data from the PALEOMAP
Project, which was done by the paleogeographer Christopher Scotese. He
referred to the "distribution of land and sea" over the past
1,100 million years to create this map.
The
user is able to choose 26 timeline options dating back from zero to 750 million
years. The user can try this using a specific address, as mentioned earlier, or
even a city, state or country. This helps people to get a detailed view from
the Cryogenian
Period at intervals of 15 to 150 million years upto now.
According
to Gizmodo’s
George Dvorsky, there were a lot of navigational features in the world. Globe
rotation toggle display options, light and cloud coverage is available in this
map. It includes short descriptions of the time period chosen pop ups and a
drop-down menu to help the users choose specific benchmarks in history,
starting from the first multicellular organism which was found 600 million
years ago, to hominids evolving in Africa around 20 million years ago.
It’s
really amazing to see the evolution of the Earth throughout the years. The
blobs of land turned into supercontinent Pangea and finally to the continents
we have now. Webster says that the visualizations must be considered
approximately even though the plate tectonic models return accurate results.
Webster
left a comment on Hacker
News, "I’m amazed that geologists collected enough data to actually
plot my home 750 [million] years ago, so I thought you all would enjoy it
too."
"Obviously
we will never be able to prove correctness," Webster concludes. "In
my tests I found that model results can vary significantly. I chose this
particular model because it is widely cited and covers the greatest length of
time."
Source
of the information: Educate
Inspire Change
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