Familiar yet alien ancient views of Earth

[Ian David]

The Planetary Society Blog
By Emily Lakdawalla
Familiar yet alien ancient views of Earth
May. 4, 2011 | 11:29 PDT | 18:29 UTC

I have always found maps of the motions of Earth's continents fascinating, so it is really cool to see some gorgeous new reconstructions of what Earth would have looked like to spaceborne observers over the last 750 million years. They've been published as part of the Visible Paleo-Earth project, which is combining current imagery of Earth's land and cloud cover with geologists' reconstructions of both the extent and the climate of past continental landmasses. They look a lot like the "Blue Marble" simulated images of Earth that are so popular on the Web, but the configurations of the continents are decidedly different, making the globes look both familiar and alien.

Here, for instance, is their simulation of what Earth would have looked like from space 220 million years ago, at the beginning of the Triassic period, the dawn of the age of the dinosaurs, when all the continents were assembled into the Pangaea supercontinent, and the climate was warmer than it is now. This period of Earth's history is well documented in the geologic record, so the outlines and colors of the continents are mapped in great detail.



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The goal of the project isn't just to produce pretty pictures; the locations and colors of continents are extremely important inputs into climate models. For example, just imagine how different ocean circulation would have been in a world with only one continent. That strongly affects weather. So these visualizations should help climatologists understand past climate and, perhaps, future climate, too. And by asking how these different views of Earth would appear as point sources of light, we can understand the range of possible appearances that very Earth-like exoplanets might have.

There are tons of other resources at the Visible Paleo-Earth website, including nifty posters showing the motions of the continents through time, so go check it out! These videos are cool, though the cloud patterns are clearly based on modern-day Earth's continent distribution -- I keep seeing shadows of Australia and South America's coasts popping up as cloud banks.

More:
http://planetary.org/blog/article/00003021/

[elias49]

1. Fascinating! Thanks! nt

[On the Road]

2. Good Catch on the Cloud Patterns

Never would have noticed that.

I'm also wondering about how much data goes into the colors indicating vegetation. Since geology and archaeology have pretty much covered the globe, there's no reason that couldn't be known. In fact, it may be possible to do species mapping too.

[Odin2005]

3. Another great paleo-geography site:

http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~rcb7/globaltext2.html

This guy's stuff is EXTREMELY detailed and pretty.