[LOOK] 1 Billion Years of Earth’s Shifting Tectonic Plates in Just 40 Seconds

A team of scientists created a 40-second animation that spans 1 billion years of tectonic plate action to demonstrate how significantly the globe has altered throughout history.

The film, which was uploaded to YouTube in February of last year, demonstrates how these enormous chunks of solid rock have shifted throughout millions of years, showing how places that are familiar to us now were in quite different locations on the Earth millennia ago.

Earth's Evolution in 40 Seconds

While the tectonic plates that cover Earth as a jigsaw puzzle move about as quickly as our fingernails grow, a fascinating animation illustrates that over a billion years, that's enough time for them to traverse across the whole globe.

The plates are more than simply a protective layer for the globe; their movement impacts everything that lives there, including the temperature, tidal patterns, animal migrations and evolution, volcanic activity, the creation of metals, and more.

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"For the first time a complete model of tectonics has been built, including all the boundaries," geoscientist Michael Tetley, who completed his PhD at the University of Sydney, explained to Euronews in 2021.

Things move in millimeters each year on a human time scale. Yet, as shown in the animation below this page, the continents have been everywhere throughout history. At the equator, places like Antarctica-now frigid, snowy, and inhospitable-were previously fairly pleasant places to vacation.

If you watch the movie more closely, you'll see that the plates shift and slide quite a bit. Near neighbors turn into distant relatives and vice versa. You might be shocked at how recently the continents and nations settled into their current locations.

More Details Needed For Timelapse

If scientists want to forecast how habitable our planet will be in the future and where we will discover the metal resources we need to assure a future powered by renewable energy, Science Alert said people must first understand these motions and patterns.

By analyzing the geological record, including the magnetism that provides information on substrates' historical positions concerning the Earth's spin axis and the types of material locked in rock samples that aid in putting the pieces of previous geological plate puzzles together, one can estimate plate movement.

In particular, the Neoproterozoic to Cambrian eras (1,000 to 520 million years ago) were meticulously mapped and brought in line to match the more recent data we have since, the farther back scientists venture, the harder it is to predict how plates have shifted.

Even though there are still many unanswered questions regarding how and when these plates initially formed, each new piece of information advances our knowledge of the planet's prehistoric past and even helps certain models account for missing plates.

Because it spans the whole globe and a billion years, the scientists acknowledge that their work lacks some finer detail. However, they still believe it may serve as a helpful resource and a starting point for future research on these motions and their effects on the rest of the world.