We’ve all wondered what our homes looked like 10 years before we got there, or 50 years, 1000 years, or millions of years. Just a century ago, it could’ve been dirt roads and a general store. Hundreds of millions of years ago, the place you call home could have quite literally been somewhere else entirely on the face of the Earth. But where was it? That’s the aim of a new online tool, Paleolatitude, built by researchers from Utrecht University, detailed in a study published in PLOS One.
The online tool lets users track any physical place on earth back through 320 million years of geological history. It works by analyzing magnetic structures locked inside ancient rocks that have minerals inside them aligned with the Earth’s magnetic field, effectively recording their original latitude like a timestamp. Scientists can now decode that signal to figure out where that piece of land once sat on the face of the Earth.
The researchers added newer data on tectonic plate movements to sharpen the tool’s accuracy, including movement from smaller plates and even info on landmasses that have been lost to time.
The Tool Is Fun and All, But It Does Have an Actual Use Too
It’s not just a cool tool to see where your home or office used to be in a different ZIP Code. It’s going to help researchers better understand how life on Earth and the Earth’s climate evolved together. Knowing where a rock was located when it formed helps scientists reconstruct ancient climates and ecosystems with incredible precision, letting them know what certain climate conditions held sway during certain eras.
That’s all well and good, but I can’t deny that it’s pretty cool to have a tool that turns the abstractions of continental drift and the shifting of tectonic plates over millions of years into a nifty little online thingy that takes all of that highfalutin complexity and makes it intimate, allowing me to find my place within the multimillion-year-old data set.
Now I know that the land my home sits on was about -26 degrees latitude away from where it currently resides. Same ground, completely different county.
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