Pangea Day - Geology Style
YouTube say it’s Pangea Day, which is “a global event dedicated to bringing people together through film”. But I have other ideas. More geological ideas.
Pangea was the last great super continent, which existed between the very late Permian (about 250 million years ago) to the end of the Triassic (about 200 million years ago). Pangea was the culmination of all the major continents of the Earth, brought together on one side of the planet, surrounded in what must have seemed like a never-ending ocean called Panthalassa.
On this Pangea Day, as a geologist, or simply as a geologically minded person, or even someone mildly interested in deep time (and passing by YouTube’s event), I proposed you post an image showing where on or about Pangea the bedrock that currently underlies you was sitting. More precisely, where would you be living now if Pangea hadn’t broken up.
Here’s my submission (Mid to late Triassic about 220 million years ago):
My bedrock was almost as far south as you could get, while still having land to stand on.
Where was your bedrock? There’s a fantastic resource for paleogeography at Dr. Ron Blakey’s (of Northern Arizona University) Global Paleogeography project page. Here’s a quick link to the rectangular paleogeography maps - but be sure to take a good look at the other resources there (including the regional paleo maps).
9 Responses to “Pangea Day - Geology Style”
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May 11th, 2008 at 3:28 am
SoCal what whaaat!
(i think, anyway…)
May 11th, 2008 at 6:52 pm
[...] 11, 2008 SF Bay Area , map , meme , paleogeography , plate tectonics Following the lead of Chris at goodSchist and Callan at NOVA Geoblog, below is a snapshot of global paleogeography during the Late Triassic - [...]
May 12th, 2008 at 6:57 pm
[...] geology stylee Following the Pangaea Day geoblogosphere meme, started by Chris@goodSchist and followed up by Callan@Nova, Brian@clastic detrius and Chris@highly allochtonous I suppose I [...]
May 13th, 2008 at 1:32 pm
Good meme! I love Dr. Blakey’s maps. I discovered a while ago that they wrap quite nicely around Google Earth. Maybe you’ll enjoy:
http://graceland.ca/files/graffiti/tectonics.kmz
You might have to turn off other layers for this one to make sense. It looks really cool if you set repeat and bounce on the player.
May 13th, 2008 at 3:33 pm
Sorry, a correction…as an NAU graduate student I thought I would point out that Ron’s last name is Blakey.
May 13th, 2008 at 7:48 pm
Thanks Beau. Superfluous “l” removed.
May 13th, 2008 at 10:32 pm
[...] from Good Schist had a nice idea: locate where you (or, more precisely, your bedrock) would have been when the [...]
May 13th, 2008 at 10:38 pm
Thanks for the great idea! I tried it myself, but perhaps not completly successfully…
May 15th, 2008 at 6:22 am
[...] it’s probably time for a new meme to sweep through the geoblogosphere. Last week, it was Pangea Day and before that it was Tag Clouds (I think we’re burning through Accretionary Wedge ideas at [...]