
Ancient Earth Globe - BerislavLopac
https://dinosaurpictures.org/ancient-earth#240
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pvg
A Show HN with comments by the author:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17286770](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17286770)

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dmos62
Grass appeared 35 million years ago? At the same time as the first primates?
And flowers 120 million years ago? After dinosaurs appeared (220 million years
ago)? My mind is blown. What did landscapes look like?

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billiam
What's really amazing is to think that it was only after grasses started
taking over that very large land mammals could evolve on the vast marshy
plains of North America and over 5 million years or so as sea levels rose due
climate change become whales and other cetaceans. I wonder if humans will do
the same, albeit in much less nutritious oceans that we are busily acidifying.

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simonh
We don’t need to evolve much in the way of new adaptations anymore, we have
technology. That’s how come we can colonise environments from the frozen
tundra, to tropical jungles, to the harshest deserts, and now even the vacuum
of space.

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nurettin
Humans didn't need much technology to live in deserts and tundras. But what if
they run out of earth metals to cycle? What if they can't build sustainable
energy sources? Our top modern "tech" lasts a couple of hundreds of years
before totally collapsing. Humans will eventually go back to simpler tools, be
it 10 million years or 100. I give it a couple of hundred thousand.

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simonh
We’ve essentially built the entire modern world in a bit over a century. The
only way we’ll run out of metals to recycle is if we shoot it all out into
space. Otherwise it’ll still be here in one form or another. I am concerned
about the long term sustainability of our current phase of civilisation. I
think our current way of life is largely doomed, but we will develop new ways
of life.

Tens of millions of years is a long time. Who knows?

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nurettin
We live in a mildly corrosive atmosphere, doesn't help with the whole
metallurgy venture. Recycling goes a long way, but it will eventually be over.

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hooo
Good seeing Ian's work here!

[http://www.ianww.com/](http://www.ianww.com/)

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zcdziura
Sort of off-topic: I love looking at images of how the Earth's continents have
shifted and moved over time. They provide a lot of inspiration for me when
making homemade maps for my D&D games. Whatever nature has done makes for much
more compelling and believable maps than what I can make on my own!

My latest map is based on a rotated view of what Pangaea Proxima will
(probably) look like in a few million years. Looks pretty neat and provides a
lot of inspiration.

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johnchristopher
Aren't generators really good now ? I was under the impression they really did
improve over the last years.

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martythemaniak
Super cool stuff. If the author has time, it would be even possible to derive
the major climate zones at that time using large scale features like latitude,
mountains, etc.

Here's a nice reconstruction of what Pangea looked like (200m years ago)
[https://youtu.be/VKq0pr4rbRs](https://youtu.be/VKq0pr4rbRs)

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lhousa
Things escalated pretty quickly between first flowers and fist primates

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Hammershaft
Very impressive, what is a good resource for an interested layman to learn
more about earth science and deep time?

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ajaalto
John McPhee: Annals of the former world, Simon Winchester: The Map that
Changed the World, Lutgens et al.: Essentials of Geology

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based2
[http://www.scotese.com/](http://www.scotese.com/)

[https://vimeo.com/315907106](https://vimeo.com/315907106)
DeepTimeMaps_Animation_Mollweide_Sample

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Aardwolf
This is so awesome, I just wish it could go back even further to 1 billion, 2
billion, ... years ago! If we know enough about the Earth's history and
tectonics to depict it...

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theandrewbailey
I'm surprised that it doesn't go forward any. East Africa is on the move, and
the Caribbean and Mediterranean Seas are getting walled off.

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tekcyb-org
I don't understand how land masses the size of africa detaches. The map shows
africa attached to the US, but this doesn't make sense. I can understand water
levels changing, exposing new areas that might have been underwater, drying up
and turning into land masses, as well as areas that were previously land,
becoming filled with water.

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Waterluvian
It’s a fantastic question this stuff isn’t intuitive.

[http://mapdesign.icaci.org/wp-
content/uploads/2012/04/atlant...](http://mapdesign.icaci.org/wp-
content/uploads/2012/04/atlantic_lg.jpg)

Consider this model: the Earth is like a puzzle. Its crust is made up of a
bunch of pieces that all fit together. But those pieces aren’t unchanging.
They all sit on top of a huge soft sludgey core called the mantle. And they
want to slowly (slooooooowly) slide around.

At each boundary between pieces one of three things can happen:

\- they slide against each other

\- they diverge from each other

\- they press into each other, often one going under the other, sometimes one
pushing the other.

A continent can move, oh so slowly, over millions of years through a
combination of shifting along with other plates, or having one side of its
plate grow (move away and have the new gap filled with the molten plasticy goo
underneath), while the other side pushes away a plate or disappears underneath
the other plate.

The map I linked shows a massive stretch mark of the Earth in the Atlantic
Ocean. This is one striking piece of evidence that the above effects have been
happening over a long long time. It’s basically the boundary between a few
plates. And it shows all this brand new ocean floor that came flowing up from
under the crust (then cooled and got hard) when a gap was created because they
separated apart.

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tekcyb-org
Wow thank you for the explanation and that picture you provided makes it very
clear as well. I did not realize that the world was divided into plates.

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tremon
There's a BBC documentary on this that's now around 25 years old, called Earth
Story
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Story](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Story)).
It describes not only what we know, but how we know it. As documentaries go,
it's rather in-depth but easily digestible.

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Wubdidu
Thanks for the suggestion, it sounds really interesting based on some YouTube
comments. Just ordered it used from the UK, first time I'll be watching an
actual DVD since... years. I think I do have a DVD drive somewhere in storage.

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jagger27
Brilliant to see where some land masses stay relatively intact and how little
they've changed. Newfoundland and Labrador in today's Eastern Canada stand out
to me. I really want to those weathered ancient mountains some day.

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tremon
What amazed me most is the relative short (recent) period in which the
Himalayas formed. India split from Madagascar relavively recently, the speed
with which it collided with asia must have been huge.

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zamadatix
I could instantly recognize the map as work of Christopher R. Scotese. Has
there been other work to create paleo maps or was this work from 2000 and
prior so definitive nobody has felt the need?

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mkl
That whole site is pretty neat. So many dinosaurs!

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instakill
How can you make it stop spinning?

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jacobush
Some serious interplanetary engineering, likely involving Fusion Candles on
Jupiter to gather materials and fuel. Then a constant bombardment of Earth
from the right angle should stop the spinning, eventually.

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myself248
I wonder if it could be done with nothing more than "solar sails" at ground
level, aimed so they reflect the sunrise and push back against rotation, but
exert no directional force the rest of the day.

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dirtyid
I wish there was a way to overlay all major cities.

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fauigerzigerk
Amazing! I wish it didn't end in the present.

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tvalentius
One of my favourite earth's 3D visualisation

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Rajdeep100
pretty awesome

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Rajdeep100
Cool

