Earth through time
Continents and oceans from 1000 million years ago to today, reconstructed from a plate tectonic model. Localities
ride their plates back in time: show localities
with ?loc= and Mindat locality ids, or go to 0 Ma and click the map to drop a point. Drag the map
sideways to move its centre, or switch to the globe and drag to turn it.
Events shown as you play/scroll
Igneous activity: lava pulses mark provinces (size scaled by province area); rising ash marks giant eruptions (size scaled separately by magma volume). Symbols mark representative points, not geographic extent or a single province-wide eruption. Province age ranges remain active throughout; Oruanui uses 0.026 Ma. Size ranges use midpoints and lower bounds use the stated bound.
Impact display ages: Beaverhead 600 Ma; Tookoonooka 124 Ma; Charlevoix 441.5 Ma; Karakul 60 Ma (age poorly constrained, less than 60 Ma). Explosion sizes use the supplied crater diameters, including Chesapeake Bay’s outer collapse zone.
Plate model: Merdith, A. S. et al. (2021), Extending full-plate tectonic models into deep time: Linking the Neoproterozoic and the Phanerozoic, Earth-Science Reviews 214, 103477 (doi:10.1016/j.earscirev.2020.103477), via GPlates, CC BY 4.0. Coastlines before ~540 Ma are much less certain than younger ones. A locality is shown from when its piece of crust exists in the model, not yet from when the locality itself formed.