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New Digital Tool Lets You See Where Your Backyard Was Millions of Years Ago

Gizmodo·Ellyn Lapointe·6 months ago
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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.…

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