A new online tool allows people to gain remarkable insight into where the land they reside on was millions of years ago.
As Gizmodo detailed, a group of Earth scientists unveiled Paleolatitude, where users can input any location and view latitude changes over the past 320 million years.
The information cleanly appears on a graph with an X-axis of millions of years and a Y-axis showing vast shifts of thousands of miles in that span. While it doesn't show longitude changes or the movement on the globe, it still provides a revealing glimpse of Earth's history.
It was no small effort to get this tool up and running, according to team leader Douwe van Hinsbergen, a professor of global tectonics and paleogeography at Utrecht University in the Netherlands.
"It took 10 years and a lot of nerdy work to get this done," Van Hinsbergen revealed to Gizmodo.
The work is the culmination of the Utrecht Paleogeography Model, which goes deep into the past when the North American continent was joined with Africa, South America, and Europe, forming the supercontinent Pangaea.
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The U.S. Geological Survey explained that a three-pronged fissure tore the continent apart and created a new ocean basin in the Atlantic. Everything that followed created the present-day world.
Over the past decade, Van Hinsbergen and the team worked on completing the models. That included filling in the highly deformed areas between the larger plates, such as the Caribbean, the Himalayas, and the Mediterranean.
With that work done, researchers now have more tools than ever to trace rocks' journeys. That includes their latitudinal movements and their original plates that have been lost over the years.
While the website is fun for internet users to play around with, it has real applications for science.
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The team told Gizmodo it can aid paleoclimatologists, who study ancient climates, to trace exactly where rocks were during the period they're reconstructing. Along similar lines, it can provide insights about ancient biodiversity and habitation following mass extinction events.
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