\u201cIt took 10 years and a lot of nerdy work to get this done,\u201d van Hinsbergen told Gizmodo. He hopes that this accessible tool will not only get people excited about paleogeography but also aid research across a range of fields.<\/p>\n
Once you plug in your desired location at the paleolatitude.org<\/a> site, a chart will appear on the left side of the screen that maps its change in latitude (on the Y axis) over millions of years (shown as \u201cage (Ma)\u201d on the X axis). By tracing the blue line, you can eyeball how that location has drifted north or south throughout Earth\u2019s history. Of course, this does not reveal changes in longitude\u2014east-to-west movement\u2014and the tool does not offer an animated view of the location migrating across the globe, which would have been nice to see.<\/p>\n Continents on the move <\/p>\n From roughly 320 million to 200 million years ago, the North American continent was contiguous with Africa, South America, and Europe, existing as a single continent called Pangaea. Then, a three-pronged fissure tore<\/a> Africa, South America, and North America asunder, creating a volcanic rift zone that unleashed powerful eruptions as magma surged through the weakened crust.<\/p>\n Eruptions spewed ash and volcanic debris as the continents diverged and the widening gaps between them formed the Atlantic basin. Over millions of years, they split further, shifted, and drifted into the map of the world we know today.<\/p>\n A decade ago, van Hinsbergen and his colleagues developed a plate tectonic reconstruction for the major plates, but it did not include the intensely deformed regions between the plates, such as the Caribbean, the Himalayas, and the Mediterranean. These regions are \u201crelics of plates that once existed at the Earth\u2019s surface but have gone into the mantle,\u201d van Hinsbergen explained.<\/p>\n \u201cMy colleagues and I have reconstructed all those regions in enormous detail,\u201d he said. The result is a refined global model that will allow researchers to connect rocks back to the plates they originally formed on, even though those plates have disappeared into the mantle. They will also be able to trace the latitudinal journeys of those rocks through deep time.<\/p>\n A multidisciplinary asset <\/p>\n![\"Geo](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/Geo-Paleolatitude-Screenshot-DC.jpg\")
The shift in the latitude of Washington, D.C. over the past 320 million years. Screenshot from Paleolatitude.org \u00a9 Utrecht University <\/p>\n