Earth from Pangea to the 21st century: continents, cities, population. Video cards

Did you know that many millions of years ago all of Russia was located above Estonia? (Narva on the map in the center of the circle).

The protocontinent (or supercontinent) Pangea broke apart approximately 200-210 million years ago. At first, it split into 2 pieces - Laurasia and Gondwana, which then split again and brought the appearance of our planet to the version that we see to this day. In the picture presented above, the authors have drawn the borders of currently existing countries and their possible location on the territory of Pangea.

In the best resolution you can see

Pangea (ancient Greek Πανγαῖα - “the whole earth”) is the name given by Alfred Wegener to the protocontinent that arose during the Paleozoic era.

During the formation of Pangea, mountain systems arose from more ancient continents at the sites of their collision, some of which have existed to this day, for example, the Urals or the Appalachians. These early mountains are much older than such relatively young mountain systems as the Alps in Europe, the Cordillera in North America, the Andes in South America or the Himalayas in Asia. Due to erosion lasting many millions of years, the Urals and Appalachians are rolled low mountains. The giant ocean that washed Pangea is called Panthalassa.

Pangea formed during the Permian period, and split into two continents at the end of the Triassic, approximately 200-210 million years ago. The northern continent of Laurasia later split into Eurasia and North America, while the southern continent of Gondwanaland later formed Africa, South America, Australia and Antarctica.

It should be noted that supercontinents existed before, for example Rodinia, which broke up 750 million years ago (in the figure).

According to some forecasts, in the future the continents will once again gather into a supercontinent called Pangea Ultima.

Where they post the most interesting and crazy maps - there is, for example, a map of the USA, on which states are marked in red where you cannot have a fox as a pet, and green - where you can. We have chosen the ten most unusual ones, using only one criterion: they all make you look at the planet in a new way.

1. Political map of Pangea

We live on large solid floats that cover a sea of liquid stone with shells; floats - tectonic plates - move slowly, and those parts that protrude from the ocean either converge or diverge. The last time they came together was 335 million years ago, forming the supercontinent Pangea. The fact that Pangea is not a fiction is evidenced by the remains of Paleogene animals: for example, exactly the same mesosaurs lived in southern Africa and in the southern part of modern Argentina and Chile. We recently wrote about how the continents will behave in the future (and how they drifted in the past) in a video review, and now we invite you to look at the map of Pangea, on which the contours of modern states have been plotted. The Volga flows into the Caspian Gulf, which opens directly into the global ocean - the Tethys Sea. Farewell Tibetan waves; Let's meet at the Indo-Madagascar border.

2. Antarctica without ice

The southernmost continent lies under an ice cap with an average thickness of 2.5 km and a maximum of 5 km. Two thirds are below sea level, but there are also mountain ranges. The highest mountain - almost five thousand meters Vinson - is slightly inferior to Elbrus. The Antarctic mountains are a continuation of the Andes (a fact that is fascinating in itself).

There are also volcanoes here (a few, the largest is Erebus) and a crater from an asteroid that fell to Earth 250 million years ago, leaving a crater with a diameter of 482 kilometers (like from Moscow to Voronezh); this is the largest crater on the planet. If you remove all Antarctic ice as part of a thought experiment (not taking into account the rise in sea levels after melting), you will get a map like this: in the west there is an archipelago and high mountains (similar to Hawaii), in the east there is a small continent.

3. Countries that don't have McDonalds

Life is sometimes more amazing than your wildest fantasy. From fictional maps we move on to real ones, and we see... Well, for example, a map of countries in which, as of 2016, there is not a single McDonalds restaurant. Africa is the most unlucky of all. Or lucky?

4. Ok Google, where is the Sun?

It looks like someone has brushed black paint across the United States. This is what maps of projections of celestial phenomena usually look like - for example, maps that mark where a solar eclipse will be visible from. This map, indeed, is related to the August 2017 total solar eclipse, which could be observed from the northern states, but this relationship is not direct, but indirect. The map shows the number of searches for the solar eclipse on Google. The black bar of the most active requests almost follows the path of eclipse (). But even in Texas, where the eclipse was not visible, there were terribly curious citizens.

5. The Internet is not as global as it seems

Not all inhabitants of the Earth are able to satisfy their curiosity as easily as the Americans did during the eclipse. This map shows the percentage of citizens with access to the Internet. In Somalia, for example, only one in fifty (2%) has access. If you are reading this, it means you are one of the 72% of Russians with access to the global network. Pay attention to Iceland: 330 thousand people live there (as in Smolensk), and everyone has the Internet.

6. Number of cattle

We can roughly imagine how many people live where: the most, of course, are in Asia, the least in Siberia and Antaktis. Where are the most cows, goats and sheep?

Of course, in India. Next on the list is Brazil, where there is a lot of everything (Brazil, for example, is the world leader in the export of oranges). Russia is in seventh place (we have the most cows, goats and sheep in Bashkiria, Tatarstan and Dagestan). Canada closes the top ten. Together, the livestock populations of the top ten countries account for more than half of the global livestock population.

7. Robotization map

This map is part of Bank of America's Global Trends Report last year. They considered, of course, mainly industrial robots. Japan is ahead by a huge margin, of course. It’s even strange that robots were not anticipated by Japanese science fiction writers.

8. Plug sockets of the world

You can judge how diverse the world is by looking at this map. In fact, there are many more types of plugs than the six presented on this map, but in recent years unification has taken its toll, and most of the unpopular formats have already become history. Please note: in most options, in addition to the phase and neutral pins, there is a third one - grounding. Plugs without ground are used only in Europe, the USA, Mexico and several Latin American countries.

9. Planet of Planes

The world painted by airplanes in flight looks like this. There are black holes over the countries where there is war, but sometimes there is activity over the oceans.

10. Peaceful atom

The French are the main enthusiasts of nuclear energy: the country has 58 nuclear reactors, which provide more than 70% of the country's electricity needs and provide a total capacity of 63.1 GW. There are 35 operating reactors in Russia, with a total capacity of 27.9 GW.

From the series: all/everything/everything in so many minutes

Giovanni di Paolo. Creation of the world and expulsion from paradise. 1445. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York / Giovanni di Paolo (Giovanni di Paolo di Grazia) (Italian, Siena 1398-1482 Siena). The Creation of the World and the Expulsion from Paradise. Date: 1445. Tempera and gold on wood, 46.4 x 52.1 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Video cards:
1. Growth of the Earth's population over the past 2000 years in 3.5 minutes
2. Cities of the world from 3700 BC to 2000 AD in 3 minutes
3. Continents from Pangea to the present in 12 seconds

Global population growth over the past 2000 years:

2.

Incredible video showing how world population has grown in the last 2,000 years. Video by worldpopulationhistory.org

How did the cities of the world arise?

3.

History of the urban civilization of the Earth in 3 minutes: video card. Duration: 03:21 / The History of Urbanization, 3700 BC - 2000 AD. This map visualizes the history of urban settlements over 6,000 years. Metrocosm.. The data shown in the map comes from a Yale-led study published in Scientific Data, which compiled the most comprehensive dataset on historical urban populations to date.

The data has a number of limitations and is “far from comprehensive.” Certain parts of the world are better represented than others, and some well known cities do not appear until centuries after they were founded. That said, it is the first global-scale collection of pre-1950 urban populations, and a good starting point for future research.

Each point on the map is a city from the time when the first information about its population appears; this date may not coincide with the date of its foundation.

The first city on the map, from 3700 BC. e., Ur is shown between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Not all scientists agree that Ur is the first city, but we have to start somewhere.

4.

Image from the Nature article. Spatial and Temporal Representation-Global View of Data Points. (a–f) illustrate both the spatial and temporal frequency of city-level population points for different time periods. (a–d) represent the pre-modern period, from 3700 BC–AD 1800, and use the same scale to measure frequency of data points per city. (e,f) represent the modern period and shorter time frame per period and therefore the frequency scale is shorter and separated into thirds. (g) illustrates global mean centers (GMCs) for the same time periods. Each GMC is weighted by city population for each data point and was calculated and is pictured in the Goode Homolosine projection.

5.

Brief gif version: cities from 500 BC to 150 BC. Metrocosm.

Continents from Pangea to present:

6.

200 million years of continental drift on Earth - time lapse. Duration 00:12 / 200 million year timelapse of the Earth's continental drift. Map by EarthByte, portal.gplates.org, via

For the last few millennia, the world has been waging a war for the independence of states, the redistribution of territories and neighborhood. It seems to us that the world has always been the same as it is now: there has always been Europe with its small ancient towns, America with all its diversity, the amazing flora and fauna of Australia, the centuries-old spiritual traditions of India and the East. But 175 million years ago there was only one supercontinent on our planet - Pangea.

Paleozoic era (225 million years ago)

Proterozoic era (200 million years ago)

Modern world map

Artist Massimo Pietrobon has created a map of Pangea with modern political boundaries - and it's completely unexpected!

Of course, at that time there were no countries or borders, but this is what the modern world with its political borders would have looked like if the continents of Pangea had not split apart.

Great Britain was not an island at that time. In fact, by the standards of the planet, this island appeared quite recently, approximately 8,000 years ago, when a huge tsunami separated this part of the land from the modern territory of France, Norway and Ireland.

The modern United States was adjacent to Morocco, which probably would not have pleased Donald Trump. And Brazil, known for its picturesque beaches, had no access to the sea at all, instead neighboring Namibia and Congo.

Tibet did not border (or belong to) China - happy times that the Tibetans would surely like to return! But Australia bordered Antarctica and India!

Scientists believe that Pangea formed from earlier continental parts about 335 million years ago and began spreading out about 175 million years ago. Most of it was in the southern hemisphere.

Incredible facts

We usually study world maps at school.

However, you won't see many of the maps below in a geography lesson.

These simple graphs highlight amazing details about our world and the place of different things in it.

You can learn about the level of education, population density, frequency of lightning strikes and other interesting facts in the article:

Take some time to learn something new for yourself.

Countries on the world map

1. True Africa size.

The map shows the enormous size of this continent, which can accommodate 13 countries, including China, India and the United States and all of eastern Europe.

2. The most alcoholic beverages consumed in the world.

Lilac - beer, dark gray - wine, yellow - strong drinks, blue - others, green - less than 0.1 liter.

3. Map Pangea with current international borders.

Pangea is a supercontinent that existed millions of years ago and covered one third of the Earth's surface.

4. World population concentrated in one city.

5. What the world looked like during the last Ice Age.

6. Currency of different countries

7. The most photographed places on Earth.

8. Number of prisoners per 100,000 people.

The USA tops the list.

9. There is no up and down in space. Here inverted earth map.

10. Countries of the world that were not invaded by Great Britain (in white).

11. Where do people feel? more or less loved.

Countries where people feel most loved are marked in red, and countries where people feel least loved are marked in blue.

13. Child poverty rate in Western countries.

Countries where less than 10 percent of children live below the poverty line are indicated in blue, and almost 25 percent in red. Data were not available for countries marked in grey.

14. Number of groups heavy metal per 100,000 people.