The tectonic plates that cover the Earth like a puzzle move just as fast as our nails grow, but over a billion years it is enough to travel around the planet – as a fascinating new video shows.
In one of the most complete motion patterns of tectonic plates ever put together, scientists condensed a billion years of motion into a 40-second video so we can see how these giant stone plates interacted. over time.
As it moves, the plates affect the climate, tidal patterns, animal movements and their evolution, volcanic activity, metal production and more: they are more than a cover for the planet, they are a life support system that affects everything that lives. on the surface.
“For the first time, a complete tectonic model has been built, including all limits,” geologist Michael Tetley, who completed his PhD at the University of Sydney, told Euronews.
“In human terms, things move in centimeters per year, but as we can see from the animation, the continents have been everywhere in time. A place like Antarctica that we see today as a cold, frozen and inhospitable place, was once quite a pleasant holiday destination at the equator. “
The movement and sliding of the plates is quite visible if you watch the video – the land masses close to the neighbors become distant cousins and vice versa and you might be surprised at how recently it has been that countries and continents have settled in positions we know today.
Understanding these movements and patterns is crucial if scientists are to predict how habitable our planet will be in the future and where we will find the metal resources we need to secure a clean energy future.
The movement of the plates is estimated by studying the geological record – the magnetism that provides data about the historical positions of the substrates relative to the Earth’s axis of rotation and the types of material trapped in rock samples that help match puzzle pieces of past geological plates.
Here the team strived to choose and combine the most appropriate models currently available, regarding both the movements of the continents and the interactions along the boundaries of the plates.
“Planet Earth is incredibly dynamic, with a plate surface that constantly pushes in a unique way among the known rocky planets,” says geologist Sabin Zahirovic of the University of Sydney.
“These plates move with the speed of the nails, but when a billion years is condensed in 40 seconds, a fascinating dance is revealed. The oceans open and close, the continents disperse and recombine periodically to form huge supercontinents. . “
The further scientists go in the past, the more difficult it becomes to estimate how the plates moved and, in this case, the Neoproterozoic epochs in the Cambrian (1,000-520 million years ago) were carefully drawn and aligned to fit the modern records we have.
Questions remain about how these plates first formed and when this formation occurred, but each new data point helps us understand the ancient history of the Earth – even the accounting of missing plates in some models.
Scientists acknowledge that their work does not have a finer detail – spread across the planet and a billion years – but hope that it can act as a useful resource and a basis for the future study of these movements and the impact they have. on anything else on the planet.
“Our team has created a completely new model of the evolution of the Earth over the last billion years,” says geologist Dietmar Müller of the University of Sydney.
“Our planet is unique in the way it hosts life. But this is only possible because geological processes, such as plate tectonics, provide a planetary life support system.”
The research was published in Reviews of earth science.