A palaeontologist based mostly out of California has designed an interactive map with numerous cities world wide as they had been positioned 750 million years in the past, earlier than the continental drift carried continents additional away from each other. This was additionally simply across the time the primary algae is believed to have advanced on the earth’s oceans.
Created by former Google worker Ian Webster, the Ancient Earth map contains a vary of instruments to discover totally different points of life on Earth over important durations in historical past – as an example, where the earliest reptiles lived or when the primary flower bloomed.
The app makes use of information from an current map (known as the PALEOMAP), with geological fashions for the motion of tectonic plates over 750 million years. PALEOMAP was produced by geologist and palaeogeographer Christopher Scotese. The map additionally makes use of a software program known as GPlates, utilized by geologists to visualise reconstruction and information from the motion of tectonic plates over geological time.
“My software program ‘geocodes’ the person’s location after which makes use of (Scotese’s) fashions to run their location backwards in time,’ Webster told CNN. “I constructed the interactive globe visualization and the geocoding and GPlates integration myself so that individuals may plug in their very own places.”
Mumbai’s location highlighted with a purple pin within the interactive map, at 400 million years in the past. Image: Webster
Webster’s intention was to make complicated scientific information accessible in an easy-to-use format for academics, mother and father or anybody eager on understanding the Earth’s  historical past.
The map has interactive parts that enable customers to vary the yr – wherever from 750 million years in the past until modern-day (in the present day) – and pin a spot of your selection within the map.
“It shows that our environment is dynamic and can change,” Webster, added. “The history of Earth is longer than we can conceive, and the current arrangement of plate tectonics and continents is an accident of time. It will be very different in the future, and Earth may outlast us all.”
Every important time level additionally shows info on key developments throughout that interval.