New Digital Tool Lets You See Where Your Backyard Was Millions of Years Ago
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Gizmodo
Latest Millions of years ago, the land you’re currently sitting on was located at a completely different latitude. Your backyard crossed thousands of miles to reach its particular point on the planet, and with a new digital tool, you can retrace its journey throughout Earth’s history. An international team of Earth scientists led by Douwe van Hinsbergen, a professor of global tectonics and paleogeography at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, developed a website that lets you plug in any location on the planet and see how its latitude has changed over the past 320 million years. The site, called paleolatitude.org, is built on the Utrecht Paleogeography Model, which reconstructs the movement of Earth’s tectonic plates dating back to the age of the supercontinent Pangaea. “It took 10 years and a lot of nerdy work to get this done,” van Hinsbergen told Gizmodo. He hopes that this accessible tool will not only get people excited about paleogeography but also aid research across a range of fields.
Published: April 29, 2026 6:00 pm
Source: Gizmodo — Read original