A billion-year history of the Earth fitted into a 40-second video

This video is a completely new evolutionary model, ScienceDaily reports. The earth is unique in that it has life. And this is possible only due to the incessant geological processes. From the point of view of geologists, the Earth is a very dynamic planet. Its surface is made up of tectonic plates - large blocks that constantly collide and move. As a result, the oceans open and close again, and the continents then diverge, then merge, forming huge supercontinents.

On the scale of human life, these changes are extremely slow, they are expressed in centimeters per year. However, over a billion years, scanty tectonic shifts have led to the fact that the face of the Earth has changed dramatically. Take Antarctica: today we perceive it as an icy and inhospitable place, but once it was quite a resort area on the equator.

Australian researchers have been making this video for four years using data from colleagues from all over the world. It contains information on how volcanism has transformed the seabed, how climate and ocean currents have changed, and how living things have evolved. Knowing how tectonic plates moved in the past, it is possible to predict geological processes in the future.

The study is published in the March issue of Earth-Science Reviews.