Create a map that fills the gap of 500 million years of Earth history

The Earth is estimated at 4.5 billion years old, and life first appeared about 3 billion years ago.

To shed light on this incredible history, scientists have used a variety of different techniques to identify many related components.

They determine how and when the continent moves, how life has evolved, how does climate change with time? When our ocean rises and falls, how is the land formed . Tectonic plates - large rocks, constantly moving to form the outermost layer of the Earth (crust) is center of all these studies.

Together with their colleagues, scientists published a global map of Earth's creation for half a billion years of Earth history, from 1,000 million years ago to 520 million years ago.

This time period is extremely important. This is the period when Earth experienced the most extreme climate changes known, from ice ages to superheated greenhouse conditions, from the time when the atmosphere was filled with oxygen to the emergence of multicellular life and Biodiversity boom.

So far, with the first appearance of a global map of plate tectonics, we can begin to assess the role of plate tectonics on Left systems. land. We can even solve the movement of deep structures in the Earth that change over a billion years of cycles.

The earth moves under our feet

The modern tectonic plate boundary is drawn on the map in great detail.

With Earth in modern times, global positioning satellites are used to map changes and moves of the Earth.

Earth geological mapping.(Photo: Alan Collins).

We know that the rocks heat up from a depth of 2,500km in the planet's coating (the layer below the Earth's crust), reaching the planet's sturdy shell (the shell and the top of the coating). ). This forces rigid surface tectonics to move according to the growth rate of these movements.

On the other side of the emerging sand dunes and hot rocks are the so-called submerged areas - this is where the vast areas of the ocean floor are pushed into the abyss. Finally, ocean tectonic plates fall to the boundary between the Earth's core and cover layer at a depth of about 2,900km. They combine and form heat or chemical accumulation.

For geologists, this map is an extremely useful tool. But when trying to look back at the process of Earth's transformation over time, scientists also encountered many problems. Our planet can only be mapped from here back to 200 million years ago.

Previously, for four billion years, most of the planet's surface had been lost. Because all the crust beneath the ocean has been destroyed. The non-elongated oceanic crust that is constantly pulled back deep into the Earth's heart - makes it impossible for scientists to reach.

Back in a few billion years to map the Earth

So what have scientists done to be able to map the Earth from the days when it was formed? To get the position of their boundaries and changes, scientists have looked for representations that can replace the boundaries in geological records.

The researchers found rocks formed on narrow regions, in continental collisions, or in cracks that geological fragments split. Their data comes from rocks found in locations including Madagascar, Ethiopia and far west of Brazil.

Earth maps and related work are the results of many good students and PhDs and colleagues from around the world for decades.

We now have more details and materials to study the Earth as well as more ways to continue tracing the geological time of our planet. By using a variety of combined methods, the latitudes of the continents in the past could be found - like some ice containing icing iron from the field during their formation.

This is like a fossil compass, with a needle pointing to the ground at an angle related to the latitude it forms. Near the equator, the magnetic field is nearly parallel to the Earth's surface at its poles directly falling.