© Alan Collins, Author provided
Fieldwork in central Madagascar, an area that records a continental collision at about 550 million years ago.
Earth is estimated to be around 4.5 billion years old, with life first appearing around
3 billion years ago.
To unravel this incredible history, scientists use a range of different techniques to determine when and where continents moved, how life evolved, how climate changed over time, when our oceans rose and fell, and how land was shaped. Tectonic plates—the huge, constantly moving slabs of rock that make up the outermost layer of the Earth, the crust—are central to all these studies.
Along with our colleagues, we have
published the first whole-Earth plate tectonic map of half a billion years of Earth history, from 1,000 million years ago to 520 million years ago. The colors on the map in the YouTube video below refer to where the continents lie today. Light blue is India, Madagascar, and Arabia, magenta is Australia and Antarctica, white is Siberia, red is North America, orange is Africa, dark blue is South America, yellow is China, and green is northeast Europe.
The time range is crucial. It's a period when the Earth went through the most extreme climate swings known, from "
Snowball Earth" icy extremes to super-hot greenhouse conditions, when the atmosphere got a major injection of
oxygen and when multicellular life appeared and
exploded in diversity.
Now with this first global map of plate tectonics through this period, we (and others) can start to assess the role of plate tectonic processes on other
Earth systems and even address how movement of structures deep in our Earth may have varied over a billion year cycle.
Comment: One very beneficial way to relieve stress and increase a state of well being is to practice Éiriú Eolas.