Reversing 300 Million Years of Continental Drift

If you’re a fan of the theory of dynamic plate tectonics (and really, who isn’t?), you can spend a lot of time checking what that has meant for where you live by playing with Dinosaur Pictures’ Ancient Earth Globe app, where you can plug in your address and see how the Earth where you’re at has changed over tens and hundreds of millions of years!

We did that, where we plugged in a famous address in Washington D.C., which centered the globe in today’s world on the Western Hemisphere. We then moved backwards in time, until we got to a point where the spot where Washington D.C. would eventually be located moved into the opposite hemisphere. The following animated image shows 300 million years worth of that continental drift in reverse….

We set up the animation so that each of the frames would be displayed for eight seconds, which should allow enough time to read some of the additional information that the app presents.

Do check it out – although we stopped at 300 million years, the app goes back some 750 million years.