Carole King's song I Feel the Earth Move would be the perfect soundtrack for a stunning new video that shows a billion years of plate tectonic movement on Earth condensed into 40 seconds.
An international team of geoscientists created a model of tectonics that lets us witness the radical changes in how our planet looked over an eon of time. Continents shift. Oceans reshape. The world is almost unrecognizable until we move closer to modern times.
Plate tectonics is a theory about large pieces of rock ("plates") that move over the planet's mantle. These plates can account for radical changes in the locations of landmasses over long stretches of time.
"On a human timescale, things move in centimeters per year, but as we can see from the animation, the continents have been everywhere in time," said co-author Michael Tetley in a University of Sydney statement on Monday. "A place like Antarctica that we see as a cold, icy inhospitable place today actually was once quite a nice holiday destination at the equator."
The video isn't just a novelty. The University of Sydney said the ability to model plate tectonics like this will help scientists understand not just the physical movement of the plates, but also "how climate has changed, how ocean currents altered and how nutrients fluxed from the deep Earth to stimulate biological evolution."
The story of plate tectonics is tied into the story of our planet's habitability. "With this new model," said geoscientist Dietmar Muller, "we are closer to understanding how this beautiful blue planet became our cradle."
Global Forest Sound Map
This is brilliant but, be warned, you may start spending a lot of time tuning in to these incredible, soothing and captivating soundscapes. It's a Global Forest Sound Map and allows you to hear sounds from all over the world, from a monkey in China, to a river in Canada and way beyond. Time for a virtual holiday!?