Map Fills 500-Million Year Gap in Earth's Tectonic History | RealClearScience

Map Fills 500-Million Year Gap in Earth's Tectonic History | RealClearScience:
"Earth is estimated to be around 4.5 billion years old, with life first appearing around 3 billion years ago.
To unravel this incredible history, scientists use a range of different techniques to determine when and where continents moved, how life evolved, how climate changed over time, when our oceans rose and fell, and how land was shaped.
Tectonic plates – the huge, constantly moving slabs of rock that make up the outermost layer of the Earth, the crust – are central to all these studies.
Along with our colleagues, we have published the first whole-Earth plate tectonic map of half a billion years of Earth history, from 1,000 million years ago to 520 million years ago.

We now have a map of plate tectonics for the period 1,000-520 million years ago.
The colours refer to where the continents lie today.
Light blue = India, Madagascar and Arabia, magenta = Australia and Antarctica, white = Siberia, red = North America, orange = Africa, dark blue = South America, yellow = China, green = northeast Europe.
The time range is crucial. 
It’s a period when the Earth went through the most extreme climate swings known, from “Snowball Earth” icy extremes to super-hot greenhouse conditions, when the atmosphere got a major injection of oxygen and when multicellular life appeared and exploded in diversity..."
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