Tectonic Globe - Explore Earth's cities on a globe of the tectonic past and future
Show HN: Today's cities on a globe of Earth's tectonic past and future
Tectonic Globe is an interactive visualization that places today's countries and cities on a dynamic globe, allowing you to rewind or fast-forward through Earth's tectonic history. Using the Merdith 2021 plate model and pyGPlates finite rotations, it reconstructs continental positions over millions of years, while a constant-motion extrapolation sketches a possible future. Perfect for educators, geology enthusiasts, and the curious, it offers a unique perspective on how our planet's surface has evolved and may continue to shift.
The future side is a constant-motion extrapolation from young plate rotations with a few coarse collision handoffs, so treat it as an interactive sketch rather than a forecast.
- w10-1
Very nicely done. Plate coloring helped, as did the red highlights for plates pressuring each other.
New for me: I didn't realize eastern russia was at the north pole 220 Mya, and rotated and came south; at the same time, no real China, and India was at the South pole. America's, Africa, Australia didn't change much, but huge changes elsewhere.
- akiselev
This is really cool!
I'm wondering what data you're using and if you can impose a more precise coordinate system into the visualizations with ways to track a specific point (perhaps starting from polygons or GPS coordinates). It seems the visualization includes sea level rise but it's hard to figure out if its getting other details right like the California’s Transverse Ranges uplift (~20 mYa to present) which moved the Los Angeles basin several hundred kilometers northwest all while San Diego and Baja California were also rearranged.
- 1over137
Is the triangle ‘play’ button supposed to do something? Maybe hug of death going on?