Watch a Billion Years of Shifting Tectonic Plates in 40 Mesmerising Seconds

from
https://www.sciencealert.com/watch-a-billion-years-of-tectonic-plate-movements-in-just-40-seconds

(I had to stop the play and just view it slowly by
using the slider to watch from recent, to way back.)

Watch a Billion Years of Shifting Tectonic Plates in 40 Mesmerising Seconds
DAVID NIELD9 FEBRUARY 2021
The tectonic plates that cover Earth like a jigsaw puzzle move about as 
fast as our fingernails grow, but over the course of a billion years 
that's enough to travel across the entire planet – as a fascinating new 
video shows.


In one of the most complete models of tectonic plate movements ever put 
together, scientists have condensed a billion years of movement into a 
40-second video clip, so we can see how these giant slabs of rock have 
interacted over time.

As they move, the plates affect climate, tidal patterns, animal 
movements and their evolution, volcanic activity, the production of 
metals and more: they're more than just a covering for the planet, 
they're a life support system that affects everything that lives on the 
surface.



"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, told Euronews.

"On a human timescale, things move in centimetres per year, but as we 
can see from the animation, the continents have been everywhere in time. 
A place like Antarctica that we see as a cold, icy inhospitable place 
today, actually was once quite a nice holiday destination at the equator."

The moving and sliding of the plates is quite a sight if you check out 
the video – land masses that are near neighbours become distant cousins 
and vice versa, and you might be surprised at just how recently it was 
that the countries and continents settled into the positions that we 
know today.


Understanding these movements and patterns is crucial if scientists want 
to predict how habitable our planet will be in the future, and where 
we're going to find the metal resources we need to ensure a clean energy 
future.

Plate movement is estimated through the study of the geological record – 
the magnetism that provides data on substrates' historic positions in 
respect to Earth's spin axis and the types of material locked in rock 
samples that help match the pieces of past geological plate puzzles 
together.

Here the team went to great lengths to choose and combine the most 
suitable models currently available, looking at both the movements of 
the continents and the interactions along plate boundaries.

"Planet Earth is incredibly dynamic, with the surface composed of plates 
that constantly jostle each other in a way unique among the known rocky 
planets," says geoscientist Sabin Zahirovic, from the University of Sydney.

"These plates move at the speed fingernails grow, but when a billion 
years is condensed into 40 seconds a mesmerising dance is revealed. 
Oceans open and close, continents disperse and periodically recombine to 
form immense supercontinents."


The further scientists go into the past, the more difficult it becomes 
to estimate how plates have moved, and in this case the Neoproterozoic 
to Cambrian (1,000 to 520 million years ago) eras in particular were 
carefully charted and brought in line to match the more modern records 
that we have.

Questions remain about how these plates first formed and when this 
formation happened, but every new data point helps us to understand the 
ancient history of Earth – even accounting for missing plates in some 
models.

The scientists admit that their work lacks some finer detail – stretched 
as it is across the entire planet and a billion years – but they're 
hoping that it can act as a useful resource and foundation for the 
future study of these movements and the impact they have on everything 
else on the planet.

"Our team has created an entirely new model of Earth evolution over the 
last billion years," says geoscientist Dietmar Müller, from the 
University of Sydney.

"Our planet is unique in the way that it hosts life. But this is only 
possible because geological processes, like plate tectonics, provide a 
planetary life-support system."

The research has been published in Earth-Science Reviews.