Posts Tagged ‘plate tectonics’
“I was a peripheral visionary. I could see the future, but only way off to the side.”*…
As Niels Bohr said, “prediciton is hard, especially about the future.” Still, we can try…
While the future cannot be predicted with certainty, present understanding in various scientific fields allows for the prediction of some far-future events, if only in the broadest outline. These fields include astrophysics, which studies how planets and stars form, interact, and die; particle physics, which has revealed how matter behaves at the smallest scales; evolutionary biology, which studies how life evolves over time; plate tectonics, which shows how continents shift over millennia; and sociology, which examines how human societies and cultures evolve.
The far future begins after the current millennium comes to an end, starting with the 4th millennium in 3001 CE, and continues until the furthest reaches of future time. These timelines include alternative future events that address unresolved scientific questions, such as whether humans will become extinct, whether the Earth survives when the Sun expands to become a red giant and whether proton decay will be the eventual end of all matter in the Universe…
A new pole star, the end of Niagara Falls, the wearing away of the Canadian Rockies– and these are just highlights from the first 50-60 million years. Read on for an extraordinary outline of what current science suggests is in store over the long haul: “Timeline of the far future,” a remarkable Wikipedia page.
Related pages: List of future astronomical events, Far future in fiction, and Far future in religion.
* Steven Wright
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As we take the long view, we might send grateful birthday greetings to the man who “wrote the book” on perspective (a capacity analogically handy in the endeavor featured above), Leon Battista Alberti; he was born on this date in 1404. The archetypical Renaissance humanist polymath, Alberti was an author, artist, architect, poet, priest, linguist, philosopher, cartographer, and cryptographer. He collaborated with Toscanelli on the maps used by Columbus on his first voyage, and he published the the first book on cryptography that contained a frequency table.
But he is surely best remembered as the author of the first general treatise– De Pictura (1434)– on the the laws of perspective, which built on and extended Brunelleschi’s work to describe the approach and technique that established the science of projective geometry… and fueled the progress of painting, sculpture, and architecture from the Greek- and Arabic-influenced formalism of the High Middle Ages to the more naturalistic (and Latinate) styles of Renaissance.
“Everything is in motion. Everything flows.”*…
(Roughly) Daily has looked at the related theories of plate tectonics and continental drift before (e.g., here and here). They are relatively young: proposed in the early twentieth century by Alfred Wegener, they weren’t widely accepted until 1960 or so. Now they’re fundamental– and allowing scientists to reconstruct the earth’s past. To wit, this animation looking at the Earth’s tectonic plate movement from 1 ga (geological time for 1 billion years ago) to the present-day (the video starts at time 1,000 ma [1,000 million years ago], and moves at the rate of about 25 million years every second)…
Here’s a even more ambitious project, looking back 3.3 billion years:
More on plate tectonics and the supercontinents that it formed (and unformed) at Visual Capitalist.
* William Hazlitt
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As we buckle up, we might recall that in the very late 50s, the Ohio Art Company– which had been pursuing a pair of business: toys (e.g., windmills and a climbing monkey) and custom metal lithography products for food container and specialty premium markets– found a way to merge the two. It acquired the rights to French electrician André Cassagnes‘ L’Écran Magique (The Magic Screen)– a drawing toy that allowed users to spin knobs to create line drawings, which could be erased by by turning the device upside down and shaking it. Ohio Art renamed it the Etch A Sketch, and introduced it in this date in 1960.
At its launch, which was near the peak of the Baby Boom, the Etch A Sketch was priced at $2.99 (equivalent to $26 in 2020); the company sold 600,000 units that year … and went on to sell over 100 million units and to earn a place in the National Toy Hall of Fame.
“When I was a kid my parents moved a lot, but I always found them”*…
Pangea was the latest in a line of supercontinents in Earth’s history.
Pangea began developing over 300 million years ago, eventually making up one-third of the earth’s surface. The remainder of the planet was an enormous ocean known as Panthalassa.
As time goes by, scientists are beginning to piece together more information on the climate and patterns of life on the supercontinent. Similar to parts of Central Asia today, the center of the landmass is thought to have been arid and inhospitable, with temperatures reaching 113ºF (45ºC). The extreme temperatures revealed by climate simulations are supported by the fact that very few fossils are found in the modern day regions that once existed in the middle of Pangea. The strong contrast between the Pangea supercontinent and Panthalassa is believed to have triggered intense cross-equatorial monsoons.
By this unique point in history, plants and animals had spread across the landmass, and animals (such as dinosaurs) were able to wander freely across the entire expanse of Pangea…
Since the average continent is only moving about 1 foot (0.3m) every decade, it’s unlikely you’ll ever be alive to see an epic geographical revision to the world map.
However, for whatever life exists on Earth roughly 300 million years in the future, they may have front row seats in seeing the emergence of a new supercontinent: Pangea Proxima…
More– including how it happened and a larger version of the image above– at “Incredible Map of Pangea With Modern-Day Borders.”
* Rodney Dangerfield
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As we go with the flow, we might send historic birthday greetings to Dorothy Annie Elizabeth Garrod; she was born on this date in 1892. An archaeologist who specialized in the Palaeolithic period, she was the first women to hold a chair at an Oxbridge university, serving as of Disney Professor of Archaeology at the University of Cambridge from 1939 to 1952.
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