NASA captured this scenery of the earth.
NASA GSFC, Norman Kuring
Carole King’s song I Feel the Earth Move is the perfect soundtrack for a beautiful new video that proclaims a billion years of plate tectonic motion on Earth in 40 seconds.
An international team of geoscientists has created a model of tectonics that allows us to see the radical changes in our planet over a period of time. Continents shift. Oceans reform. The world is almost unrecognizable until we move closer to modern times.
Plate tonics is a theory about large pieces of rock (‘plates’) moving across the planet’s mantle. These plates can explain drastic changes in the locations of land masses over long periods of time.
The scientists publish a paper on the model in the journal Earth-Science Reviews in March 2021.
“On a human scale, things move in centimeters a year, but as we can see from the animation, the continents were everywhere on time,” co-author Michael Tetley said in a statement from the University of Sydney on Monday. “A place like Antarctica that we see today as a cold, icy inhospitable place was actually once a nice vacation destination at the equator.”
The video is not just new. The University of Sydney has said that the ability to model plate tectonics such as this will help scientists not only understand the physical movement of plates, but also ‘how climate has changed, how ocean currents change and how nutrients from the deep earth flowed to stimulate biological evolution. . ”
The story of plate tectonics is linked to the story of our planet’s habitability. “With this new model,” said geoscientist Dietmar Muller, “we are getting closer to understanding how this beautiful blue planet has become our cradle.”