Observe a billion years of tectonic motion in Earth’s plates in just 40 seconds

Carole King’s song I Feel the Earth Move would be the perfect soundtrack for a stunning new video that shows a billion years of plate tectonic movement on Earth condensed into 40 seconds.

An international team of geoscientists has created a model of tectonics that allows us to witness drastic changes in the appearance of our planet over an eternity. The continents change. The oceans are reshaping. The world is almost unrecognizable until we get closer to modern times.

Plate tectonics is a theory about the large pieces of rock (“plates”) that move across the mantle of the planet. These plaques can explain drastic changes in the location of land masses over long periods of time.

Scientists published an article on the model in the March 2021 issue of the journal Earth-Science Reviews.

“On a human timescale, things move in centimeters per year, but as we can see from the animation, the continents have been all over time,” co-author Michael Tetley said in a statement Monday. the University of Sydney. “A place like Antarctica that we see today as an inhospitable cold and icy place was in fact once a fairly pleasant holiday destination on the equator.

Video is not just a novelty. The University of Sydney said the ability to model plate tectonics like this will help scientists understand not only the physical motion of the plates, but also “how the climate has changed, how ocean currents have changed and how nutrients have flow from the depths of the Earth to stimulate biological evolution. . ”

The history of plate tectonics is linked to the history of the habitability of our planet. “With this new model,” said geoscientist Dietmar Muller, “we are closer to understanding how this beautiful blue planet became our birthplace.”