Earth, 220 million years ago

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The Visible Paleo-Earth project is combining current imagery of Earth's land and cloud cover with geologists' reconstructions of both the extent and the climate of past continental landmasses. Here is their simulation of what Earth would have looked like from space 220 million years ago, at the beginning of the Triassic period, the dawn of the age of the dinosaurs, when all the continents were assembled into the Pangaea supercontinent, and the climate was warmer than it is now. This period of Earth's history is well documented in the geologic record, so the outlines and colors of the continents are mapped in great detail.

Copyright holder: The Planetary Habitability Laboratory @ UPR Arecibo, NASA, Ron Blakey and Colorado Plateau Geosystems, Inc., and The PaleoMap Project

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