Gerrard Kaonga
Earth certainly hasn’t always looked like it does now and a simulation shows just how much the planet has changed from the movement of tectonic plates.
Geologists are constantly trying to get understand exactly how the world came to being and what massive movements had to happen to result in the continents we know today.
As you can guess this is one hell of a mammoth task since the Earth is approximately 4.5 billion years old, but we are certainly learning.
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In fact, a video posted on the YouTube channel Tectonics and Earth Systems Group earlier this month shows just how much we know about the shift in tectonics over 1.8 billion years.
You can only imagine how much work and information this took to be able to somewhat accurately depict entire continents shifting around the globe over such a time frame.
The video model was released alongside a research paper in the November 2024 edition of Geoscience Frontiers.
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The work, led by Xianzhi Cao from the Ocean University in China, is aptly titled Earth’s tectonic and plate boundary evolution over 1.8 billion years.
The video begins with the most familiar view of the world, all the continents where they should be, but as the model goes back millions of years things start to shift.
It eventually shifts back to a point of Pangea, which was about 200 million years ago when all the continents were all concentrated together in one super-continent.
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Annnndd that is likely the last image that appears recognizable from the model, at least for the non-geologist.
After that, the video of the model shows the landmasses move all over the place.
Before Pangea, there were actually two other supercontinents - Rodinia (which assembled 1.26 to 0.9 billion years ago) and Nuna (2.1 to 1.8 billion years ago).
As to how the scientists made the simulation, they made use of previously published maps, along with information gleaned from the opening of tectonic basins, volcanic eruptions and ages apparent from the mountain-building process.
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But with all the fascinating things we don’t know about the present and future you might be asking why are scientists focused on the past.
Well, mapping the Earth’s previous plate tectonic activity helps build a complete digital model of Earth through its history.
By extension this allows scientists to test hypotheses about the world’s past and then find out more about the Earth’s climate.
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This ultimately helps them understand fluctuations in the past in order to help us understand the future.