Pangaea → Present

How to read this

What you are looking at

A globe, drawn entirely in characters, seen through a real perspective camera in orbit. Zoomed out, the camera hangs about forty Earth radii away and the planet is a small disc. Zoom in and it descends towards low orbit: the disc fills the frame and the horizon rises to sit near the top of the screen. The bright ring is the limb. Drag to spin; the far side of the planet is genuinely out of sight, not faded out.

Every character cell on screen casts one ray at the sphere. A ray that hits is coloured by which continent's crust sits at that point, from the coastline polygons carried on their plates, and stamped with a character whose density tracks how far inland the point is, so coastlines read as edges, continental interiors as solid mass, and the sea floor as depth bands measured by distance to the nearest coast. Cells near the limb are foreshortened, which is why the glyphs crowd there. The highlight towards the top-left is a fixed specular sheen added so the disc reads as a lit sphere; it is a lighting effect, not a solar terminator. The pale polar and tawny desert tints are latitude bands drawn in this atlas's frame (see below), not reconstructed climate.

Where the data comes from

The rotation model builds on Müller et al. (2016), Domeier & Torsvik (2014) and Matthews et al. (2016). Coastline geometry is the present-day coastline layer that ships with the model, simplified to 0.18° and carried rigidly on each plate.

What is exact and what is not

• The present day is exact. At 0 Ma every plate carries the identity rotation, so the globe is the model's modern coastline layer as published.
• Plates are rigid and the fit checks out. Each coastline polygon is rotated as one rigid piece by its plate's finite rotation, interpolated between the model's sample times. Run it back to 200 Ma and the eastern seaboard of North America closes on Morocco and the Sahara: Nova Scotia, New England and the Carolinas all land within about 200 km of today's Northwest African coast, which is the Pangaea fit.
• Africa is the reference frame. Every rotation is composed relative to plate 701 and Africa is held at its present position. That shows the continents moving relative to one another, which is what breakup looks like, but it is not an absolute frame: the model's absolute reference frame (a moving-hotspot frame for recent time, a true-polar-wander-corrected palaeomagnetic frame before that) is not applied, so Africa's own drift over the mantle is left out. The graticule is therefore today's latitude and longitude pinned to Africa, not palaeolatitude. In the Triassic the whole assembly sat roughly twenty to thirty degrees further south than it appears here, and published palaeogeographic maps, which use a palaeomagnetic frame, will disagree with this one about where the equator and the poles were.
• Deep time is approximate. The published model reconstructs continuously evolving plate polygons; this atlas reduces it to rigid present-day coastlines. Terranes that were assembled or deformed since, such as Tibet, Southeast Asia, the Caribbean and the Mediterranean, are drawn with their modern outlines even when those outlines did not exist, and no flooded shelf seas are shown. The range stops at 250 Ma, the model's best-constrained window; treat Triassic and Jurassic positions of the small plates as indicative, not authoritative.

Controls

Mouse: drag to spin the globe, wheel to zoom (the point under the cursor stays put). Touch: one finger spins, two fingers pinch to zoom. Both work anywhere on the disc, and manual navigation interrupts a guided flight. Z cycles the character size, which is the resolution control — smaller characters mean more cells on screen and finer detail.

Sources

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