Grass appeared 35 million years ago? At the same time as the first primates? And flowers 120 million years ago? After dinosaurs appeared (220 million years ago)? My mind is blown. What did landscapes look like?
From Wells and Huxley’s The Science of Life (1929):
It is difficult to imagine this world with
all its land surfaces lifeless; yet for more
than a half of its history Life played out its
drama under water, and the continents were practically barren. They were stark and bare, starker and barer than the utmost desert of today. Over the bare cliffs and desolate plains the sole breath of movement came from the wind and rain. A certain margin there may have been of faintly vitalized soil. From comparatively early times, a few simple algae may have trailed their filaments over the seashore or the moist borders of rock pools, or a few bacteria invaded the crumbling earth surface...
The face of the land was like nothing we
know today. There could have been no
real soil, for soil is largely a product of plant action. There was no carpet of plants and felt-work of roots to hold water like a sponge, preventing rapid run-off, and to blanket the ground from excessive gain and loss of heat; and so the work of frost and wind, rain and sun, was much more active. The heights of the land were worn down quicker and sediments more actively deposited, and the scenery was more angular and forbidding. Even long after the first appearance of land-plants vast regions of the land which would now be covered with vegetation remained desert or semi-desert, since all the earliest plants demanded a good deal of moisture.
Plants like grasses, which can thrive on dry steppes and prairies, are comparatively modern things. The Paleozoic Era knew nothing of them and the Mesozoic comparatively little. There was a desert flora and fauna in the Triassic; but possibly at least, the regions it inhabited would today be steppes or savannahs.
It is a good exercise of the scientific
imagination to picture this desolate and
desert earth, its continents cyclically rising out of the waters and submerging themselves again, occasionally undergoing a spasm of mountain-building or an ice age, but remaining essentially lifeless for well over five hundred of our million-year periods, in spite of the abundant presence and notable progress of life in the waters. Through all these ages, the lands remained unconquered and must have seemed unconquerable.
> “Science knows that the disappearance of dinosaurs and the appearance of flowers occurred simultaneously, yet, strangely, it has never drawn much of a connection between the two events. It is up to perfumers to correct the oversight.
> “Vegetarian dinosaurs dined on ferns, floating water plants, and the palmlike cycad. They were not very intelligent, and certainly not very French, having developed a limited, strictly specialized diet. When the great mountain building took place during the Cretaceous Period, seaways drained and swamps dried up. First the aquatic plants, then the ferns and cycads succumbed. Insufficient surface water. Some new plants had been gradually moving in, however. These plants were inconspicuous at first, and neither the dinosaurs nor the swamp plants paid them much attention. Ah, but they had plans for the future. They began to grow their roots longer and longer, sink them deeper and deeper, until they could reach the moisture trapped beneath the surface, and when their stringy little exploratory organs hit the water table-POW!” (Bunny smacked the podium; if V’lu and Priscilla hadn’t been awake before, they were now.)
> “POW! They exploded in a scandalous display of sexual invitation.
> “The old claw-and-fang world of drab, predatory, reptilian repression had never seen anything like this. Lasciviously colored, scandalously scented blossom after blossom flaunted its genitalia openly, enticing with visual and heretofore unknown olfactory charms any who might be inclined to sample its pleasures.
> “With their appalling genius for adaptability, insects responded enthusiastically to the outbreak of sensuality. So did the smaller birds. Dinosaurs, however, were repulsed. Although their reproductive equipment must have been monumental-the penis of a Brontosaurus would have been only a couple of yards shorter than the thirty-foot organ of the great blue whale-it was kept out of sight and infrequently used. The dim-witted, thin-blooded dinosaur was not a hot lover, another way in which it differed from the French.” There was a soft ripple of laughter. Very soft. “It mated once a year, barring headaches. So put off was the prudish dinosaur by the sexy smell of flowering plants that it starved to death and went extinct rather than eat them.”
What's really amazing is to think that it was only after grasses started taking over that very large land mammals could evolve on the vast marshy plains of North America and over 5 million years or so as sea levels rose due climate change become whales and other cetaceans. I wonder if humans will do the same, albeit in much less nutritious oceans that we are busily acidifying.
Sort of off-topic: I love looking at images of how the Earth's continents have shifted and moved over time. They provide a lot of inspiration for me when making homemade maps for my D&D games. Whatever nature has done makes for much more compelling and believable maps than what I can make on my own!
My latest map is based on a rotated view of what Pangaea Proxima will (probably) look like in a few million years. Looks pretty neat and provides a lot of inspiration.
Super cool stuff. If the author has time, it would be even possible to derive the major climate zones at that time using large scale features like latitude, mountains, etc.
I can strongly recommend Earth: An Intimate History by Richard Fortey.
Also
Land of Mountain and Flood: The Geology and Landforms of Scotland - mind you that is obviously just about Scotland but it is a gorgeous and fascinating book!
This is so awesome, I just wish it could go back even further to 1 billion, 2 billion, ... years ago! If we know enough about the Earth's history and tectonics to depict it...
I don't understand how land masses the size of africa detaches. The map shows africa attached to the US, but this doesn't make sense. I can understand water levels changing, exposing new areas that might have been underwater, drying up and turning into land masses, as well as areas that were previously land, becoming filled with water.
Consider this model: the Earth is like a puzzle. Its crust is made up of a bunch of pieces that all fit together. But those pieces aren’t unchanging. They all sit on top of a huge soft sludgey core called the mantle. And they want to slowly (slooooooowly) slide around.
At each boundary between pieces one of three things can happen:
- they slide against each other
- they diverge from each other
- they press into each other, often one going under the other, sometimes one pushing the other.
A continent can move, oh so slowly, over millions of years through a combination of shifting along with other plates, or having one side of its plate grow (move away and have the new gap filled with the molten plasticy goo underneath), while the other side pushes away a plate or disappears underneath the other plate.
The map I linked shows a massive stretch mark of the Earth in the Atlantic Ocean. This is one striking piece of evidence that the above effects have been happening over a long long time. It’s basically the boundary between a few plates. And it shows all this brand new ocean floor that came flowing up from under the crust (then cooled and got hard) when a gap was created because they separated apart.
All continents rest on tectonic plates, which kind of rest on the liquid core and are moving around on it. Let enough time pass, and the plates will move around, and the continents with them.
Now how that large land mass came to be is an interesting question to me. The globe shown here in the title/link is clearly not homogeneous. The land mass on one side must be less dense than the rest of the earth for it to protrude above sea level that way.
Brilliant to see where some land masses stay relatively intact and how little they've changed. Newfoundland and Labrador in today's Eastern Canada stand out to me. I really want to those weathered ancient mountains some day.
What amazed me most is the relative short (recent) period in which the Himalayas formed. India split from Madagascar relavively recently, the speed with which it collided with asia must have been huge.
I could instantly recognize the map as work of Christopher R. Scotese. Has there been other work to create paleo maps or was this work from 2000 and prior so definitive nobody has felt the need?
Some serious interplanetary engineering, likely involving Fusion Candles on Jupiter to gather materials and fuel. Then a constant bombardment of Earth from the right angle should stop the spinning, eventually.
[+] [-] pvg|5 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17286770
[+] [-] dmos62|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mjklin|5 years ago|reply
It is difficult to imagine this world with all its land surfaces lifeless; yet for more than a half of its history Life played out its drama under water, and the continents were practically barren. They were stark and bare, starker and barer than the utmost desert of today. Over the bare cliffs and desolate plains the sole breath of movement came from the wind and rain. A certain margin there may have been of faintly vitalized soil. From comparatively early times, a few simple algae may have trailed their filaments over the seashore or the moist borders of rock pools, or a few bacteria invaded the crumbling earth surface...
The face of the land was like nothing we know today. There could have been no real soil, for soil is largely a product of plant action. There was no carpet of plants and felt-work of roots to hold water like a sponge, preventing rapid run-off, and to blanket the ground from excessive gain and loss of heat; and so the work of frost and wind, rain and sun, was much more active. The heights of the land were worn down quicker and sediments more actively deposited, and the scenery was more angular and forbidding. Even long after the first appearance of land-plants vast regions of the land which would now be covered with vegetation remained desert or semi-desert, since all the earliest plants demanded a good deal of moisture.
Plants like grasses, which can thrive on dry steppes and prairies, are comparatively modern things. The Paleozoic Era knew nothing of them and the Mesozoic comparatively little. There was a desert flora and fauna in the Triassic; but possibly at least, the regions it inhabited would today be steppes or savannahs.
It is a good exercise of the scientific imagination to picture this desolate and desert earth, its continents cyclically rising out of the waters and submerging themselves again, occasionally undergoing a spasm of mountain-building or an ice age, but remaining essentially lifeless for well over five hundred of our million-year periods, in spite of the abundant presence and notable progress of life in the waters. Through all these ages, the lands remained unconquered and must have seemed unconquerable.
[+] [-] rrrrrrrrrrrryan|5 years ago|reply
> “Vegetarian dinosaurs dined on ferns, floating water plants, and the palmlike cycad. They were not very intelligent, and certainly not very French, having developed a limited, strictly specialized diet. When the great mountain building took place during the Cretaceous Period, seaways drained and swamps dried up. First the aquatic plants, then the ferns and cycads succumbed. Insufficient surface water. Some new plants had been gradually moving in, however. These plants were inconspicuous at first, and neither the dinosaurs nor the swamp plants paid them much attention. Ah, but they had plans for the future. They began to grow their roots longer and longer, sink them deeper and deeper, until they could reach the moisture trapped beneath the surface, and when their stringy little exploratory organs hit the water table-POW!” (Bunny smacked the podium; if V’lu and Priscilla hadn’t been awake before, they were now.)
> “POW! They exploded in a scandalous display of sexual invitation.
> “The old claw-and-fang world of drab, predatory, reptilian repression had never seen anything like this. Lasciviously colored, scandalously scented blossom after blossom flaunted its genitalia openly, enticing with visual and heretofore unknown olfactory charms any who might be inclined to sample its pleasures.
> “With their appalling genius for adaptability, insects responded enthusiastically to the outbreak of sensuality. So did the smaller birds. Dinosaurs, however, were repulsed. Although their reproductive equipment must have been monumental-the penis of a Brontosaurus would have been only a couple of yards shorter than the thirty-foot organ of the great blue whale-it was kept out of sight and infrequently used. The dim-witted, thin-blooded dinosaur was not a hot lover, another way in which it differed from the French.” There was a soft ripple of laughter. Very soft. “It mated once a year, barring headaches. So put off was the prudish dinosaur by the sexy smell of flowering plants that it starved to death and went extinct rather than eat them.”
- Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume
[+] [-] billiam|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] glial|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rosstex|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hooo|5 years ago|reply
http://www.ianww.com/
[+] [-] zcdziura|5 years ago|reply
My latest map is based on a rotated view of what Pangaea Proxima will (probably) look like in a few million years. Looks pretty neat and provides a lot of inspiration.
[+] [-] johnchristopher|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] martythemaniak|5 years ago|reply
Here's a nice reconstruction of what Pangea looked like (200m years ago) https://youtu.be/VKq0pr4rbRs
[+] [-] lhousa|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Hammershaft|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ajaalto|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arethuza|5 years ago|reply
Also
Land of Mountain and Flood: The Geology and Landforms of Scotland - mind you that is obviously just about Scotland but it is a gorgeous and fascinating book!
[+] [-] based2|5 years ago|reply
https://vimeo.com/315907106 DeepTimeMaps_Animation_Mollweide_Sample
[+] [-] Aardwolf|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] theandrewbailey|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tekcyb-org|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Waterluvian|5 years ago|reply
http://mapdesign.icaci.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/atlant...
Consider this model: the Earth is like a puzzle. Its crust is made up of a bunch of pieces that all fit together. But those pieces aren’t unchanging. They all sit on top of a huge soft sludgey core called the mantle. And they want to slowly (slooooooowly) slide around.
At each boundary between pieces one of three things can happen:
- they slide against each other
- they diverge from each other
- they press into each other, often one going under the other, sometimes one pushing the other.
A continent can move, oh so slowly, over millions of years through a combination of shifting along with other plates, or having one side of its plate grow (move away and have the new gap filled with the molten plasticy goo underneath), while the other side pushes away a plate or disappears underneath the other plate.
The map I linked shows a massive stretch mark of the Earth in the Atlantic Ocean. This is one striking piece of evidence that the above effects have been happening over a long long time. It’s basically the boundary between a few plates. And it shows all this brand new ocean floor that came flowing up from under the crust (then cooled and got hard) when a gap was created because they separated apart.
[+] [-] danielbln|5 years ago|reply
Check out this image of the plates: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plate_tectonics#/media/File:Pl...
[+] [-] Rexxar|5 years ago|reply
You can currently see continent splitting in Island and in Africa : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_African_Rift
[+] [-] phkahler|5 years ago|reply
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-ocean_ridge
Now how that large land mass came to be is an interesting question to me. The globe shown here in the title/link is clearly not homogeneous. The land mass on one side must be less dense than the rest of the earth for it to protrude above sea level that way.
[+] [-] jagger27|5 years ago|reply
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