Antarctica was once on the equator. These are some of the findings that you can see in the following video: one billion years of continental drift in 40 seconds .
The video is the result of research published in the March 2021 issue of Earth-Science Reviews . For the first time, a complete tectonic model has been built, including all limits.
Continental drift
Lead author and creator of the video, Andrew Merdith began working on the project while he was a PhD student with Dietmar Müller of the EarthByte geoscience group at the University of Sydney.
The model will help scientists understand how the climate has changed, how ocean currents were altered, and how nutrients flowed from deep within the Earth to stimulate biological evolution.
Continental drift is the displacement of continental masses relative to each other. This theory was developed in 1912 by the German Alfred Wegener from various empirical-rational observations, but it was not until the 1960s, with the development of plate tectonics, when the movement of the continents could be adequately explained. Life on Earth simply would not exist without plate tectonics.