A team from the Planetary Habitability Laboratory has created a series visualisations of the Earth's surface and how it has changed over the last 750 million years.
The Visible Paleo-Earth (VPE) project has used Nasa satellite imagery, palaeogeographical know-how and palaeoclimate reconstructions to "generate our best interpretation of the global visual appearance of Earth in the last 750 million years, as seen from space", as said in a press release.
The images have been collated into informative works, including one entitled 30 Planets, One Home, which shows how the Earth's surface changed over millions of years in a series of rotations (viewable in our gallery) and videos showing how landmasses have moved to become the global map we recognise today. The images have been constructed layer-by-layer using computer software and the combined knowledge of data from Nasa Visible Earth, Ronald Blakey's Global Palaeogeography and Christopher Scotese's PALEOMAP Project. Computing the images means that they are easier to update with new scientific finds. Although the landmasses' shapes, distribution and colours seen in the images have been recreated to the best of the project's scientific knowledge, Professor Abel Méndez, its Principal Investigator, admits it was a "task with many artistic liberties due to our limited knowledge of those periods".
While the images are fairly easy on the eye and undeniably fascinating, their scientific impact cannot be disputed. The project started as a spinoff of research at the Planetary Habitability Laboratory (PHL) to understand Earth-like exoplanets better by looking into the evolution of our own. With this knowledge of what Earth used to look like, the PHL can better develop observational methods for looking for other habitable planets and trace the evolution of their habitability. In short -- it is now easier to know what habitable planets look like early on in their existence.
The PHL is not stopping with the past 750 million years however, and is currently creating the Visible Neo-Earth, a view of the Earth in the future. We're placing bets on alien invasions now.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
