The west coast of North America as it appeared roughly 215 million years ago (map by Ron Blakey)
Posted on 09/25/2013 6:56:19 AM PDT by Renfield
The paleo-tectonic maps of retired geologist Ronald Blakey are mesmerizing and impossible to forget once you've seen them. Catalogued on his website Colorado Plateau Geosystems, these maps show the world adrift, its landscapes breaking apart and reconnecting again in entirely new forms, where continents are as temporary as the island chains that regularly smash together to create them, on a timescale where even oceans that exist for tens of millions of years can disappear leaving only the subtlest of geological traces.
With a particular emphasis on North America and the U.S. southwest—where Blakey still lives, in Flagstaff, Arizona—these visually engaging reconstructions of the Earth's distant past show how dynamic a planet we live on, and imply yet more, unrecognizable changes ahead.
These images come from Ron Blakey's maps of the paleotectonic evolution of North America. The first map shows the land 510 million years ago, progressing from there — reading left to right, top to bottom — through the accretion and dissolution of Pangaea into the most recent Ice Age and, in the final image, North America in its present-day configuration....
(Excerpt) Read more at theatlantic.com ...
The west coast of North America as it appeared roughly 215 million years ago (map by Ron Blakey)
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I like the old version better.
Ooohhh, there was so much more coastline to be had. I wonder if coastal property and water views were affordable back then.
Do you suppose we could go back to that...?
I was born just a couple of million years too late. I’d have had beach front property.
Reunite Gondwanaland!
So if you lived in Baker, Calif., Rhyolite, Nev. or Yuma, Ariz. at the time, you would have had beach-front property.
All you’d need are a tall ship and fair winds. Lots of exploring to do!
Oh sure, lots o’coastline, but they didn’t have the Oprah Winfrey Network’s quality programming back then!!
/s
That’s all well and good, but my ferry-ride to the mainland would take a week instead of an hour and a half...
On the other hand, had I stayed where I was born, I’d be a two hour drive to the sea. I’d miss the Rockies, though.
There’s no Cabo. There must be a Cabo.
I would have had my own island!
We obviously need a massive scheme of government intervention and control to stop anthropogenic continental drift!
He’s not even close. Geologists made a bad assumption fifty or so years ago.....
Here’ is what happened:
http://www.threeimpacts-twoevents.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Geologic-Sensemaking-Simultaneous-Impacts-10May2013.pdf
On the other hand, had I stayed where I was born, I’d be a two hour drive to the sea. I’d miss the Rockies, though.
"Where can we go when there's no San Francisco?
Better get ready to tie up the boat in Idaho."
--From Day After Day by Shango
“Where can you go,
When there’s no San Francisco!
Better get ready to tie up the boat,
In Idaho.”
Old song from the late 1960s.
An example of what can be done with too much time on someone’s hands. Nonsense.
Horsemanure.
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