For millions of years the Earth has changed quite a lot, but real estate is eternal. At least, this idea is behind an interactive map, created by the software engineer Ian Webster.
With this map, you can find out where your home or city is located on the ancient megacontinent of Pangea.
The map shows how the Earth has changed over the last 750 million years. You can see what was 540 million years ago, 300 million years, 90 million years and so on. You can see and various great events in the history of our planet, such as the appearance of the first animals, grass or the birth of multicellular life.
As Webster himself explains, “I built this model on the basis of GP Plates, an academic project that provides geologists with a program for studying tectonic plates. I was very surprised when I found out that the geologists had already accumulated so much data that they could literally show where my house was 750 million years ago. Although models of tectonic plates give accurate results, it is better to still consider them approximate, since we will never be able to prove how correct they are. In my experiments, I found out that the results of different models can be quite different. I chose this particular model, since it is quoted the most and covers the longest period of time. ”
Visualizations can help us imagine and understand the ancient Earth, a place that was very different from what we see now.
