Ancient Earth Globe • Hacker News Board

Re: Ancient Earth Globe

#31

Post by typpo » Mon, May 08, 2023, 3:23 AM UTC

zamadatix wrote: post #23

Something that surprises me about these types of presentations is they all reference the work of Chris Scotese. As far as I can tell that work is over 20 years old from its last coat of paint and 40 years old from when the bulk of the work was done. The website even has the late 90s early 2000s feel (not just in looks but if you click around you can find his kids personal pages from when they were in high school, I w…

Very true. As the author of this visualization, I airbrushed the country borders off the two most recent textures. Because it was too obvious that the borders show the Soviet Union :)

Professor Scotese was a great partner and instrumental in putting this visualization together. He's acknowledged on the site, but for those interested here is his website: http://www.scotese.com/. I believe he has a more modern iteration of the paleomap that is not downloadable on the web, but for various reasons I did not get those textures in this visualization (they didn't wrap properly iirc).

He also has a nice writeup of the methods used here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-q0WIa7ofISFHyBe4UxvN8DIPs8...

Re: Ancient Earth Globe

#32

Post by 1attice » Mon, May 08, 2023, 4:38 AM UTC

mpsprd wrote: post #26

This is really interesting, but I have trouble enjoying it because the earth keeps spinning while I try to look at a specific part.

I also have this problem with the actual world IRL

Re: Ancient Earth Globe

#33

Post by temptemptemp111 » Mon, May 08, 2023, 4:55 AM UTC

[dead]

Re: Ancient Earth Globe

#34

Post by AlotOfReading » Mon, May 08, 2023, 5:01 AM UTC

mpsprd wrote: post #25

trhr wrote: post #20

It's comforting to know there wasn't any ice at the north pole 20Mi years ago, and humans survived just fine.

In hindsight, this is most probably a joke, but I still looked it up. Earliest humans, Homo Habilis, appeared 2.4-1.4 Mi years ago.

Apes as a whole only split from other monkeys around 24mya, and genus Homo shares ancestors with chimpanzees about 7mya. Evolution happens both incredibly quickly and incredibly slowly depending on what you're comparing it to.

Re: Ancient Earth Globe

#35

Post by rand0mx1 » Mon, May 08, 2023, 5:06 AM UTC

mr_toad wrote: post #21

c3534l wrote: post #19

I wonder if there are continents we'll never know about because they get completely subducted and aren't part of any existing continent today.

The map goes back less than a billion years. We don’t know much about the shape of the Earths continents for the first few billion years.

Movement of plate tectonics started probably 750 million years ago. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DI6SemRT2iY

Re: Ancient Earth Globe

#36

Post by a1371 » Mon, May 08, 2023, 5:12 AM UTC

When you search a city it shows its location at the time. I thought it probably just takes in the coordinates but to my amusement, it actually pins the location based on the tectonic plate that the city is on. So it can't show Seattle of 470 million years ago because that tectonic plate didn't go as far back. Intriguing!

Re: Ancient Earth Globe

#37

Post by OlympusMonds » Mon, May 08, 2023, 5:30 AM UTC

zamadatix wrote: post #23

Something that surprises me about these types of presentations is they all reference the work of Chris Scotese. As far as I can tell that work is over 20 years old from its last coat of paint and 40 years old from when the bulk of the work was done. The website even has the late 90s early 2000s feel (not just in looks but if you click around you can find his kids personal pages from when they were in high school, I w…

Pretty much spot on. To summarise, I would say Scotese drew these maps based off ~vibes~, especially when it comes to the paleogeography.

You can see much more cutting edge research here: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.add2541, which is done within the group that built GPlates. (video of the outputs here: https://youtu.be/QaDt1VQ9WlY )

Re: Ancient Earth Globe

#38

Post by usremane » Mon, May 08, 2023, 5:32 AM UTC

As an enhancement to the website it’ll be cool to see how earth might look in future based on the movements so far.

Re: Ancient Earth Globe

#39

Post by dilippkumar » Mon, May 08, 2023, 5:33 AM UTC

mr_toad wrote: post #27

casefields wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just so we’re clear—the most recent ice age was already ending before the industrial revolution. Unless you believe like a couple did in the 70s that there was a coming ice age which we completely stopped and reversed. I would love to hear the steelmanning for that.

We’re still technically in an ice age - there is permanent ice at the poles (for now). In contrast during other ages all the ice melted in summer, even at the poles.

That’s fascinating!

Where can I read more?

Re: Ancient Earth Globe

#40

Post by Affric » Mon, May 08, 2023, 6:13 AM UTC

trhr wrote: post #22

Affric wrote: post #14

Very cool. Like many of these tools it suffers from northern hemisphere bias that hides interesting information about the southern hemisphere. In looking to correctly simulate axial tilt we get Gondwana and Antarctica hidden from view in the shadow, their sunlit versions only available via options rather than hidden by default. The southern polar region is the more interesting of the two for the vast majority of geol…

Well, if Gondwana wants more prestige, maybe THEY should design a map.

Easy to say but everyone is missing out. Our knowledge is best when shared and we account for our biases.