Earth has changed a lot over the millennia. The Earth’s surface looked quite different in the geological past thanks to information gleaned from geological maps, fossil evidence, magnetic “compasses” encased in volcanic minerals, and supercomputer simulations. Imagine for a moment that you could place yourself, your home, your city, 240 million years ago in the early Triassic , when oxygen levels were significantly lower than now due to the extinction of many land plants. Many corals went extinct, and reefs took millions of years to reform. Barely a few ancestors of birds, mammals, and dinosaurs survived. We are in the huge land mass that was the supercontinent Pangea.
With software engineer Ian Webster’s Ancient Earth tool, we can do it – you can use this interactive 3D app to see how the planet’s continents and oceans have changed over time in incredible detail and if you want you can write your address in a search box and you will see a dot appear on the 3D globe, indicating approximately where you would have lived at that time.
Not only can you navigate and see Earth 240 million years ago; this is the default starting point of Ancient Earth, when Pangea was at its most complete and the age of the dinosaurs was just beginning. From the central drop-down you can zoom out even further in time how our planet looked up to 750 million years, in the cryogenic period, in which glaciers could have covered the entire planet during the largest known ice age on Earth. It is when different types of single-celled organisms first appear, such as green algae; from there, you can reach our days.
The geology of the world is a colossal puzzle
“Ancient Earth” was created using data from Gplates , an open repository of plate tectonic data that reveals the movements of tectonic plates throughout Earth’s history. Webster added the visual touch to this data, meaning you can gaze at what the Earth looked like when the first flowers appeared, for example, or when the first reptiles evolved and giant insects began to diversify. And it is that this tool is a rotating view of the world at various points in time. You can select the time period (“what was the Earth like 750 million years ago?”) Or search by events, such as “the first multicellular life”, “the first insects”, “the extinction of the dinosaurs” …
“Although plate tectonic models return accurate results, you must consider the approximate plots (obviously, we will never be able to demonstrate the correctness). In my tests I found that model results can vary significantly. I chose this particular model because it is widely cited and covers the most time, ”explains Webster.
As a curiosity, the term Pangea, used by Alfred Wegener, main author of the theory of continental drift, comes from the Greek pan (everything) and gea (land) .
