Pangea with modern national borders

June 2, 2013 11:39 AM

There was a time when New York was next to Casablanca.
posted by Chocolate Pickle (27 comments total)

There was a time when New York Halifax was next to Casablanca.
posted by pjenks at 11:51 AM on June 2, 2013 [2 favorites]

I'm so bummed we can't have a ferry out of Boston called the Marrakesh Express.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 12:05 PM on June 2, 2013

In 200-250 million years we'll be back to a similar arrangement.
posted by 445supermag at 12:14 PM on June 2, 2013 [2 favorites]

Does anybody have a guess as to how accurate this is?

Super cool, incidentally.
posted by Fists O'Fury at 12:15 PM on June 2, 2013

Huh. The fjords of Norway and Greenland are like a zipper.

Also:

Big Arctic Lake

That's some quality namificatin', guys.
posted by Flunkie at 12:17 PM on June 2, 2013 [2 favorites]

Man, Indonesia.
posted by box at 12:23 PM on June 2, 2013

Continental drift didn't work out so great for Tibet, did it.
posted by prize bull octorok at 12:27 PM on June 2, 2013 [3 favorites]

I like the point being illustrated, but the geographic features are modern. I'm pretty sure the Hudson bay and the Great Lakes didn't look like that way back when.
posted by gjc at 12:43 PM on June 2, 2013 [1 favorite]

Of all the gin joints in all the world, her continent had to drift into mine.
posted by HeroZero at 12:52 PM on June 2, 2013 [13 favorites]

Wouldn't the flow of the Amazon and Mississippi rivers leave Florida and parts of East Africa sumerged underneath a massive lake?
posted by Groundhog Week at 12:58 PM on June 2, 2013

Wouldn't the flow of the Amazon and Mississippi rivers leave Florida and parts of East Africa sumerged underneath a massive lake?

By the time that the Amazon and Mississippi had formed, Pangaea had broken up long, long ago.
posted by Flunkie at 1:19 PM on June 2, 2013 [1 favorite]

Wouldn't the flow of the Amazon and Mississippi rivers leave Florida and parts of East Africa sumerged underneath a massive lake?

Those rivers arise out of mountain chains that were formed by the collision of plates as Pangea rifted.
posted by spaltavian at 1:20 PM on June 2, 2013 [1 favorite]

Yeah, so then why leave the current geographic features on there? It would be interesting to see how the geography and climate would be different.
posted by Groundhog Week at 1:27 PM on June 2, 2013

The Mediterranean, the "great sea" of the classical world, is basically a series of large lakes and the actual ocean is vast, world-encompassing. What it would have been like to sail that giant sea! What waves like mountains, what great beasts, what solitude could have been found upon that empty world.
posted by Joe in Australia at 1:33 PM on June 2, 2013 [4 favorites]

They didn't leave current geographic features on there; they superimposed them on there. They did this because it's neat. It happens to be a different thing than what you're apparently interested in, but it's still neat.
posted by Flunkie at 1:41 PM on June 2, 2013 [1 favorite]

From the site: "What you see here is an anachronistic mashup — a modern map, complete with geological features that did not exist 300-million years ago"
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 1:52 PM on June 2, 2013

Pangaea in the early Triassic 237ma and the Permian 255ma from the excellent resource PALEOMAP Project.
posted by Long Way To Go at 1:58 PM on June 2, 2013

This map doesn't look right to me. The shoreline of the North American continent would have been somewhere in eastern California or Nevada. There would be no Los Angeles or San Francisco.
posted by JackFlash at 2:56 PM on June 2, 2013

Somehow it makes sense that Jonestown practically happened in Florida.
posted by George_Spiggott at 3:05 PM on June 2, 2013 [2 favorites]

"By the time that the Amazon and Mississippi had formed, Pangaea had broken up long, long ago."

The New River was there though, if probably flowing in the other direction.
posted by Blasdelb at 3:57 PM on June 2, 2013

What it would have been like to sail that giant sea! What waves like mountains, what great beasts, what solitude could have been found upon that empty world.

The waves wouldn't have been any larger then then they are now. The largest pilosaurs and ichthyosaurs were only about half the length of a blue whale.
posted by delmoi at 5:06 PM on June 2, 2013

Pretty sure Iceland shouldn't even be on this map. I'm not sure I understand the purpose of using modern features that weren't present at the time.
posted by dogwalker at 6:38 PM on June 2, 2013

I'm perplexed how horizontal motion is vast yet vertical motion is miniscule (~constant shorelines).
posted by tinker at 9:41 PM on June 2, 2013

!!!!!

This is so cool!

I love reading about continental drift. For some reason, it's just one of the most fascinating things to me.

But whenever I see such illustrations, at most they identify just the continents. I've always wanted to see a map like this with the political borders included.

<swoon>
posted by paleyellowwithorange at 12:05 AM on June 3, 2013

"I'm perplexed how horizontal motion is vast yet vertical motion is miniscule (~constant shorelines)."

This is a bit of an illusion. Vertical motions seem miniscule, but consider the rates:

- horizontal plate motion: usually 10-40 mm/yr, up to 100 mm/yr
- vertical plate motion (uplift/subsidence) 0.1-10 mm/yr
- post-glacial rebound (vertical motion) 0.1-10 mm/yr

And not really the same thing, but it affects the kind of thing like the above map:
- eustatic sea-level change (vertical) from continental ice volume 0.1-10 mm/yr

The numbers are from wikipedia and a geology textbook. Horizontal motions are larger, but not massively larger than vertical motions. They seem so much bigger in the end because horizontal-distributed forces don't have to contend with the unbending will of gravity. A plate could, in theory, go right around the globe.
posted by chalcopyritical at 12:24 AM on June 3, 2013

I'd love to see this reflecting the stuff that was submerged at the time.
posted by Karmakaze at 8:02 AM on June 3, 2013

(~constant shorelines).

They weren't, but it's harder to show. Sea level rise and drop happened faster than continental drift, so you can't really say here's the shoreline of the Triassic. However, sea level would have been higher in the Mesozoic, as the planet was warmer and Antarctica was not centered around the south pole.
posted by spaltavian at 8:18 AM on June 3, 2013