

Pictures of Earth 750 million years ago to the present - japaget
https://sites.google.com/a/upr.edu/planetary-habitability-laboratory-upra/projects/visual-paleo-earth

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greyfade
The cloud layer on each depiction is distracting - they used the same cloud
cover data from a modern year for all 30 samples. This would be much better
with either no cloud cover at all or (if our climate models are good enough)
realistically-modeled cloud cover for the land masses of the day.

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jofer
For what it's worth, the paleogeographic maps themselves are Ron Blakey's
work. The original paleogeographic maps don't have the cloud cover. Older
versions (and some additional info) are available at his NAU website here:
<http://www2.nau.edu/rcb7/> and newer versions are his company's website:
<http://cpgeosystems.com/paleomaps.html>

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iwwr
During those times, land was a barren desert. No soil, no crawling things, no
plants, just barren sand and rock. If you left an apple out in the dirt, it
would grow no mold and probably just dry out. It's hard to imagine a world
like that.

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rglovejoy
If you went back in time to that era with an apple from 2011, it would still
have bacteria and fungi on its surface and inside. The rotting might be slowed
by a possible higher intensity of ultraviolet light from the Sun, which would
kill any microbes on the surface.

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throwaway32
What i have always found fascinating is how the biology of macroscopically
large beings is so intimately intertwined at so many levels with that of the
microscopic. For instance, the average human contains/carries 10x more
nonhuman cells than human ones.

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sosuke
Do you have a source for the nonhuman cell count? That would be an excellent
water cooler topic to read up on.

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nitrogen
See the second paragraph of this Wikipedia article:
[https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Intestinal_fl...](https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Intestinal_flora)

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jsmcgd
Interesting. Personally I was disappointed there was no snowball earth.
Granted, I can imagine what it might look like but it would have been fun to
see the contrast.

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StuffMaster
That may have been more than 750 million years ago.

