
Map Shows How a Location Has Changed over the Past 750M Years - laurex
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/map-lets-you-plug-your-address-see-how-neighborhood-has-changed-over-past-750-million-years-180971507/
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typpo
Hi 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/)

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mncharity
Fyi: 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.

~~~
typpo
That's because Bali formed just a few million years ago, very recently in
geological terms!

~~~
mncharity
Ah, it's apparently Eurasian plate Cenozoic ocean floor uplifted by Indo-
Australian plate subduction, with volcanism. Neat. Could one of those plates
be used going backward?

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bluedevil2k
One 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.

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Shivetya
pretty 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
Regarding 2, I think the landmass location would be predictable, but the sea
levels wouldn't.

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b2ccb2
Link to the actual interactive map: [http://dinosaurpictures.org/ancient-
earth#0](http://dinosaurpictures.org/ancient-earth#0)

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homonculus1
This is the real link. Do not bother with the junk website posted above.

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growlist
As 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
It's also potentially interesting for archaeologists searching for remains of
ancient civilizations.

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amdavidson
How 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
What? 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.

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tim333
I 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

~~~
autokad
I believe it was connected as little is 7.5k years ago?
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doggerland](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doggerland)

~~~
tim333
I believe so. The dates above were just the ones from the map.

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benploni
Deep 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.

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arethuza
_" 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".

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theferalrobot
It would be cool if they showed estimates for the next 750 million years

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welder
Previously:

[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)

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Ididntdothis
It will take a few million years to make them but time lapse videos of these
changes will be super cool.

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mc32
Seems 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!

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iamasuperuser
This map will become very useful when Time Travel tourism takes place!

~~~
Tepix
When 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.

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iFred
This was one of those things that always ruined time travel movies for me. If
I went back in time a few hours, would I be floating in the upper atmosphere?
Go back few years, am I just floating in space? Does this mean that I can only
really travel back to the previous galactic rotation and hope to Sagan that
the galaxy both doesn't drift and the both the Sun and our arm of the galaxy
are both in the same place?

~~~
Tepix
Of course the Milky Way is also moving. In quite interesting ways:
[https://sci.esa.int/web/gaia/-/61117-future-motions-of-
the-m...](https://sci.esa.int/web/gaia/-/61117-future-motions-of-the-milky-
way-andromeda-and-triangulum-galaxies)

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baalimago
Suddenly, global warming feels very minor.

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thaumaturgy
Which 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.

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dghughes
Nova Scotia is amazingly stable back to 200 million years ago.

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mlindner
WTF? 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.

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jbattle
The 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
The 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 ... ?

