Saturday, April 23, 2011

Ron Blakey's maps bring alive Visible Paleo-Earth

These animations bring alive Earth's tectonic history in a way you've never seen before. Check out all the visualizations.

An Earth Day press release announced that the "Visible Paleo-Earth (VPE), the first collection of photorealistic visualizations of our planet from space in the last 750 million years, is released today by The Planetary Habitability Laboratory (PHL) of the University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo (UPR Arecibo). The VPE visualizations show in real true colors the changes of land and vegetation experimented by Earth in thirty frames starting from 750 million years ago to today."

"The VPE visualizations were constructed by combining the color images of Earth from NASA's Next Generation Blue Marble with the well-known global paleo reconstructions of Ronald Blakey from Northern Arizona University and Christopher Scotese from University of Texas at Arlington."