Researchers Complete New Gondwana Map 116
An anonymous reader writes "A new computer simulated map has revealed the past position of the Australian, Antarctic and Indian tectonic plates, demonstrating how they formed the supercontinent Gondwana 165 million years ago. 'It was a simple technique, matching the geological boundaries on each plate. The geological units formed before the continents broke apart, so we used their position to put this ancient jigsaw puzzle back together again,' said Lloyd White of Royal Holloway University in a press release. 'We found that many existing studies had positioned the plates in the wrong place because the geological units did not align on each plate.'"
still connected? (Score:2, Interesting)
Aren't all the continents still connected? The only thing that has changed is where the low points are that are filled in with water.
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NO! They are held apart by sticks.
Google maps? (Score:5, Funny)
When is google maps going to have this? I want to trace where my house was back then.
Re:Google maps? (Score:5, Funny)
Sir, you have a really old house.
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hey, it's a "quaint fixer-upper"
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Yabba Dabba Doo!
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Sure, but we've had some great times there. [dailymail.co.uk]
Re:Google maps? (Score:5, Funny)
It's not so surprising when you look at his username.
That also explains how he grabbed such a low user ID number.
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Sir, you have a really old house.
According to property records the house was originally owned by a F. Flintstone back when the community was known as Bedrock.
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Sir, you have a really old house.
A cave dweller, it seems.
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I want to trace where my house was back then.
That depends on what material is your house built of.
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When is google maps going to have this? I want to trace where my house was back then.
actually this raises an interesting question, if the landmasses are moving - which they are; then there is no actual absolute frame of reference for position on the earths surface over time, we can make informed guesses as to speed of land movement and extrapolate backwards temporally, but there is no actual 'unmoving' part of the earth (that i am aware of). the greenwich meridian is of course moving, perhaps our gps and
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Much of the science is based on magnetic orientation in rocks and pole flipping at known times in the past. For the rest, just work back from the present plates.
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/facepalm
I read this as Much of the science is based on magic orientation in rocks and thought you were being sarcastic or had an imaginary friend telling you the earth was only about 6,000 years old.
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Comoving coordinates [wikipedia.org]?
Yeah, I'm being a little facetious though you might be able to figure out some sort of topology where it could work... way over my head, though.
-l
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Google maps already has this. Check the paleo-reconstructions box.
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Probably Google Earth.
Re:Google maps? (Score:5, Informative)
When is google maps going to have this? I want to trace where my house was back then.
Google???
I would have been happy just to have the Summary link to the actual map instead of something several clicks removed.
The actual story is HERE [sciencedaily.com]
and a video of the breakup is here [vimeo.com]
Why do posters link to things that are simply Click-Frauds for some advertiser campaign? And why do editors let them?
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Why do posters link to things that are simply Click-Frauds for some advertiser campaign?
You've answered your own question there.
And why do editors let them?
Editors?
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Editors? Slashdot has editors?
They are more elusive than the fabled Lochness Monster, but they've been known to poke their heads up on occasion.
Granted, its been quite a while, but a Friend of a Friend once saw ...
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Actually, there are some add-on KMZ files that allow you to animate plate positions and paleogeography [google.com], but they're fairly simple.
If you want more technical, you can run GPlates [gplates.org], a fantastic, cross-platform (Windows, OS X, Linux) open-source program for modeling plate motions. Unfortunately the learning curve is pretty steep, but if you follow the tutorials you can do some very cool animations. You can even load GIS files and your own plate rotation poles if you're into that sort of thing and are willing
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If you lived in the other supercontinent and had to crank out some code, you'd be out of luck.
Not really. The Laurasians simply outsourced all their code-cutting to Gondwana - part of which would later become known as...
(Finishing that sentence is left as an exercise for the reader)
Name change (Score:2)
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Re:Name change (Score:4, Informative)
Let me Wikipedia that for you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gondwana [wikipedia.org]
Map? (Score:5, Insightful)
Original Press Release (Score:5, Informative)
Skip the regergitated article and go strait to the press release [rhul.ac.uk] to see the map, and a video (and a link to the paper if you have access or are willing to pay $30).
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Thanks, but where is the legend that says what pretty colored shape became what continent today?
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What? A crayon drawing of a dinosaur isn't enough for you? What, did you actually expect a picture of the map in the article they linked to you? Who do you think the editorial staff around here is? Jeeze.
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Video of Australia, Antarctica, India Breakup (Score:5, Informative)
In searching for the actual new map of Gondwana, the researchers in the article have this video of three continents separating.
http://vimeo.com/68311221 [vimeo.com]
Yeah. The article is lame. (Score:2)
Not only the article is lame. (Score:2)
The reconstruction has India moving West away from Australia with the Indo-Pacific archipelago presumably part of Laurasia in a relatively static position as Australia eventually moves northward. Most authors seem to have India moving east upon breakup with Africa and then colliding with southern Asia. Africa presumably splits from South America by moving east relative to South America, so the eastward rather than westward movement of India seems to be correct.
Obviously, a lot is missing from this recons
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Antarctica's the continent used as the frame of reference in the video, not Australia. Also, it looks to me like India's moving north, not west.
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There *is* no "west" from that location on that map--it's a radial projection.
Re:Video of Australia, Antarctica, India Breakup (Score:5, Funny)
Man, India moves fast. I hope it's looking where it's going or it could hit something. That would mush up a continent pretty bad.
Baltica, Amazonia and the samba connection (Score:3)
In another paper I saw that Norway+Sweden was next to Colombia and Finland next to Venezuela:
http://www.deepdyve.com/lp/elsevier/baltica-amazonia-and-the-samba-connection-1000-million-years-of-6ICpDpEcbF [deepdyve.com]
The "baltica-amazonia-and-the-samba-connection" :)
This was apparently long _before_ the Gondwana.
There is more to the Earths history than many want to understand.
This will be very handy... (Score:5, Funny)
The next time I take vacation in Gondwanaland.
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Make sure to learn to dance Gondwana Style
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Make sure to learn to dance Gondwana Style
I always preferred the Silurian Shuffle.
Re-unite Gondwana! (Score:3)
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We are the Gondwanaland Liberation Front, and we will kill you to set you free!
New Zealand (Score:2)
And New Zealand just pops into existence at the end like some just anchored a boat and fished it up out of the sea
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Hmm... is the main author of the study Australian by any chance?
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Not sure if anyone on slashdot would get the reference to the Legend of Maui fishing up The North Island (his canoe is the South Island)
But anyway I have seen a documentar (on either H2 or the Science channel)y that said that the islands of NZ are just the visible part of a sunken coninent called Zealandia, which explained how some of the unique native fauna like tuatara got there.
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No. It's much easier to find in this illustration.
http://news.discovery.com/earth/oceans/lost-continent-discovered-beneath-indian-ocean-130225.htm [discovery.com]
Animation of unified supercontinent breakup (Score:5, Informative)
Pangaea is the original unified supercontinent. Animation of its breakup is here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Pangea_animation_03.gif [wikipedia.org]
Gondwana is one of the units formed as a product of the Pangaea breakup.
This study claims heightened accuracy of the Gondwana breakup
I expected better. (Score:2)
Damn, that s a shitty article. Sourcing a poorly hand drawn illustration of a dinosaur that isn't even relevant to the discussion from Wikimedia commons?
To quote a sign I saw once... (Score:2)
Reunite Gondwanaland! - the Pangaean Liberation Front.
mark
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Nuts, I was hoping to be the first to say this. Oh well, congrats!
Gondwanland Crack Up (Score:1)
The real result is here linked from the press release page. There is a citation to the refereed journal in the pressrelease.
http://vimeo.com/68311221 [vimeo.com]
What the article probably argues for is that correlation of units on Antarctica, and Australia are well correlated. The number of linkages for India seem to be fewer, but other geologic features elucidate that history pretty will, It begins about 165 MYA, but this latest reconstruction dates the split of the rest as much more recent, about 35 MYA. I assule
Not even an abstract! (Score:1)
The article cited in the press release is behind a paywall, and the abstract for it isn't even available.
If research is funded by public funds, journals should make an e-copy available for free. Journals should not be able to hide research, especially that funded by a government, for profit. Even the need to find reviewers does not justify that they get to charge for access, at least ot an e-copy. IMHO.
Re:Earth (Score:5, Funny)
For God, a thousand years are like a day. But a year has 365 days (ignoring leap days for simplicity), so 5000 years have about 9 million days. With every day counting as 1000 years, we arrive at an age of the world of about 9 billion years. This is clearly longer than 165 million years, so everything is fine.
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Re:Earth (Score:5, Funny)
The devil is in the details, therefore God does not support the details, because that would mean to support the devil.
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The error is smaller if you consider that he started with creating the universe.
That he took so long is also a sign of incompetence. The Great Spaghetti Monster does it millions of times per second!
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A thousand years?!?? I wanna cause mass extinctions right now!
- Ed Gruberman
Re: Earth (Score:1)
Boot to the head
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For God, a thousand years are like a day.
And a thousand years is like a day, so perhaps there is something more to this than a strict conversion factor?
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That's the back conversion. Duh.
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The Group Of Drunks.
Re:Earth (Score:5, Insightful)
The God created Earth 5000 years ago. There is no evidence of Gondwana plate or even Earth 165 million years ago.
Tectonic plate theory, geophysics, botany and a host of other branches of science respectfully disagrees with you.
Re:Earth (Score:5, Funny)
The God created Earth 5000 years ago. There is no evidence of Gondwana plate or even Earth 165 million years ago.
Tectonic plate theory, geophysics, botany and a host of other branches of science respectfully disagrees with you.
Even creationists say he's off by a thousand years...
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Even creationists say he's off by a thousand years...
He's not a 1000 years off, he's living in the middle ages.
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It was a valid theory at the time, based on the best available evidence, but wrong. Even today there are many theories which are commonly accepted as scientifically valid, but which are most likely wrong in part or entirely. Our descendants will laughingly mock anyone who still believes them, just as some of us dare to mock today.
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Actually it wasn't a theory and it wasn't based on evidence. It was derived from ancient religious belief.
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Re:Earth (Score:3)
None, of course paleo-dating from fossils in marine muds and radioactive dating of the series of banded sediments on the seafloor as a result of seafloor spreading in a very regular, almost linear mapping away from spreading zones that just happen to agree with each other almost perfectly.
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I'll freely admit that I believe in the unpopular-around-here Genesis account of a literal seven-day creation event, but nowhere in the Bible does it say something along the lines of, "And God created the continents, seven in total. Seven continents did God create, and He saw that they were good." If anything, you could probably make an argument that since the Genesis creation account only mentions one "land", that it may have been meaning a super-continent. Besides which, the Bible makes no claims that wou
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Learning: you're doing it wrong.
Besides that one passage in that one book, there is nothing we have discovered that supports this claim. Nothing.
And you believe in it.
Learning: you're doing it wrong.
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I have no idea if you're being specific about my belief in a super-continent or the age of the earth being younger than what most here believe, or if you're being general and attacking my belief in the Genesis creation account in whole. Depending on what "one passage" you're referring to and the extent to which you believe the evidence for Gondwana, your comment could apply equally well to any of those three.
It's pretty hard to learn anything when there are folks like you "teaching" without even providing t
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I'll freely admit that I believe in the unpopular-around-here Genesis account of a literal seven-day creation event, but nowhere in the Bible does it say something along the lines of, "And God created the continents, seven in total. Seven continents did God create, and He saw that they were good." If anything, you could probably make an argument that since the Genesis creation account only mentions one "land", that it may have been meaning a super-continent. Besides which, the Bible makes no claims that would contradict the idea of a super-continent existing prior to the Noahic Flood, and the Noahic Flood would also provide Christians with a reason for why the continents might have split, given that the Bible talks about "the springs of the great deep burst forth" and things of that sort in Genesis 7, indicating that there may have been some significant tectonic events occurring at the time of the flood.
Long story short, there may be difficulties reconciling the 165 million year age with the Genesis creation account, but there aren't any difficulties in reconciling the idea of a super-continent with the Bible.
Or a big Tsunami.
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You always settle for sloppy seconds [google.se]?
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Ah, the hive mentality, you must be from Agile Programming. Pick a major problem, get all the scientists on Earth to work on it. Bingo, problem solved. Hey, you should tell the scientists they are doing it all wrong, I'm sure they'd listen to you.
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Hey, you should tell the scientists they are doing it all wrong, I'm sure they'd listen to you.
The ones in cancer research are...
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More than 30 years. I dated a Hodgkin's survivor in 1980-81, and she'd been in remission for about 5 years at that point.
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Mr Spock says, "The true scholar values all drafts, early and late."