Some 240 million years ago, an enormous supercontinent known as Pangea encompassed nearly all of Earth’s extant land mass, Pangea bore little resemblance to our contemporary planet, but thanks to a recently released interactive map interested parties can now superimpose the political boundaries of today onto the geographic formations of yesteryear—at least dating back to 750 million years ago. Ancient Earth is an interactive Map tool that enables users to home in on a specific location and visualize how it has evolved between the Cryogenian Period and the present.
The tool behind this millennia-spanning visualization, is the brainchild of Ian Webster, curator of the world’s largest digital dinosaur database. Webster drew on data from the PALEOMAP Project—spearheaded by paleogeographer Christopher Scotese, the initiative tracks the evolving “distribution of land and sea” over the past 1,100 million years—to build the map. Users can input a specific address or more generalized region, such as a state or country, and then choose a date ranging from zero to 750 million years ago. Currently, the map offers 26 timeline options, traveling back from the present to the Cryogenian Period at intervals of 15 to 150 million years.
Ancient Earth includes an array of helpful navigational features, including toggle display options related to globe rotation, lighting and cloud coverage. Brief descriptions of chosen time periods pop up on the bottom left side of the screen, while a dropdown menu at the top right allows users to jump to specific milestones in history, from the arrival of Earth’s first multicellular organisms some 600 million years ago to early hominids’ relatively belated emergence around 20 million years ago. To switch from one time period to another, you can either manually choose from a dropdown menu or use your keyboard’s left and right arrow keys. Start at the very beginning of the map’s timeline and you’ll see the planet evolve from “unrecognizable blobs of land” to the massive supercontinent of Pangea and, finally, the seven continents we inhabit today.
Edited from Smithsonian Magazine article by Meilan Solly,