Mind-blowing 40-second video shows evolution of Earth's tectonic plates over the past billion years
The world is rapidly evolving, not just in abstract terms but also geographically. The past several decades have seen mind-blowing changes on this planet. An animation from Earth Byte, an eGeoscience collaboration between several Australian Universities, marvelously displays what Earth has come to since a billion years ago. The focus of the appearance and change was on the tectonic plates that form the continents and markings on the globe. Interestingly, the tectonic plates "grow as fast as fingernails,” per Science Alert.
The video explained how these rapid changes have led to a complete physical shift in the appearance of the Earth. The rapid movement of the plates on the surface of the planet also brings other significant changes. The tectonic plate movement is usually due to the interaction of slabs of rocks under the surface and their movement. This can completely reconstruct the environment, climate and other factors of an area. Geoscientist Michael Tetley revealed in an interview with EuroNews in 2021 that the model for the shift of the plates in 1 billion years was created for the first time and offered a spectacular visual of gradual change.
He explained that the Earth is super dynamic and said, “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. A place like Antarctica, which we see as a cold, icy and inhospitable place today, was once quite a nice holiday destination at the equator." The added cause of these shifts could be radioactive heat and processes reforming the structures. The former causes plates to shift, creating water basins and other water bodies.
The video is a 40-second motion showing how different parts of continents merge, mix, or cut away over the years to recreate a formation. “We have created the first continuous plate model with evolving plate boundaries spanning 1 Ga (one billion years) to the present day. This study is intended as a first step in the direction of a detailed and self-consistent tectonic reconstruction for the last billion years of Earth's history,” the caption of the video explained. It’s safe to say that what the globe looks like today is totally different from how it looked millions of years ago. The clip is not the end of the tectonic plates' movement, it will keep shifting rapidly.
Understanding the course of the shifts is crucial in the study of geology for people to understand their resources, availability and more. Tetley elaborated further, “This is how we view biological evolution, for example, and also climatic evolution. All things that are tied to the tectonics. So understanding this base level process is hugely important for science." Right from the water bodies to the continents, each has and will continue to observe a drastic change in its appearance and the Earth might not look anywhere close to the way it does in the next billion years.