The Formation of the Earth has a history of 4.6 billion years, and in the course of billions of years of evolution, the Earth has formed seven continents and four oceans. The movement of plates was accompanied by the emergence and evolution of life on Earth. So how has the state of the earth's land and sea changed over the billions of years? Let's look at it through a series of maps.
Although the Earth was formed 4.6 billion years ago, the original Earth was furnace-shaped. After 400 million years of evolution, the Earth's temperature gradually dropped. Then after a long period of evolution, the ocean was formed. The earliest Earth was almost landless and was a veritable "water balloon". About 3.8 billion years ago, the earliest creatures began to appear in the oceans.
Cambrian and Ordovician: About 600 million years ago, Earth was captured by the sun's gravitational pull and became the third planet of the sun from the inside out. Since then, the sun has begun to provide heat to the cooling surface. After entering the solar system, the earth has a regular orbit and autobiography, with cold and heat and four seasons, with day and night. In the Interior of the Earth, the Core or InnerSphere is biased in the opposite direction of the Sun's gravitational pull and is not in the center of the Earth. The Autobiography of the Earth causes the movement of the Earth's crust from east to west, forming mountains, plateaus, valleys and plains. This laid the foundation for the formation of the continent. The land of this era was very scattered, mainly in the southern hemisphere.
Creatures: Trilobites flourished in this era, and fish began to appear. An extinction event occurred at the end of the Ordovician.
A continent 540 million years ago
Silurian (440 million years ago - 410 million years ago): In the late Silurian period, the earth's crustal movement was strong, the ancient Atlantic Ocean closed, and some plates collided between them, resulting in the rise of some trough folds, great changes in paleogeography, significant expansion of the continental area, and a huge evolution of the biological world, all of which marked a turning point in the development of the history of the earth's crust.
Creatures: Plants begin to land.
A continent 430 million years ago
Devonian: From the Beginning of the Devonian Period, the Earth began to move west of the sea again, and many areas rose up, exposing the sea to become land. In the Devonian period, ferns flourished, and insects and amphibians arose. Vertebrates entered a period of rapid development, the number and variety of fish-shaped animals increased, and the modern fish, the teleost fish, began to develop. The Devonian is often referred to as the "Fish Age", in which a large-scale mass extinction of species was separated between the Devonian and Carboniferous periods , the super mantle pillar. Of this mass extinction, 75% of species went extinct.
Carboniferous (360 million years ago – 280 million years ago): The Carboniferous period was a period of great activity in the movement of the Earth's crust, so the paleogeography changed dramatically. During this period, climatic differentiation was very obvious, with the northern paleocontinent being a warm and humid coal-gathering area, while the gondwana continent was a cold continental glacial sedimentary environment. Climatic zones have led to the formation of geographical divisions of flora and fauna.
Permian (290 million years ago to 250 million years ago): The Permian was more active in crustal movement, the relative movement between paleoplates intensified, many troughs around the world closed and successively formed a folded mountain system, and the paleoplasts gradually joined each other to form a joint paleocontinent (Pan-Continent). The further expansion of land area, the reduction of marine scope, and the changes in the natural geographical environment have promoted the important evolution of the biological world and heralded the arrival of a new era in the history of biological development. At the end of the period, a mass extinction event occurred.
240 million years ago: The United Paleocontinental was formed
Triassic (250 million years ago – 200 million years ago): During the Triassic, most of the continents on Earth formed a huge continent. The climate was relatively warm and dry, with no signs of glaciers. Today it is generally believed that there was no land or ice at the poles at that time. Because the Earth had only one continent at the time, the coastline at that time was much shorter than it is today. Angiosperms and dinosaurs began to appear.
The continent 200 million years ago
Jurassic (200 million years ago – 140 million years ago): The block movement led to the separation of the south of South America from Africa. The Lauya ancient land also gradually separated from Africa and South America, creating the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico. Along the edges of these rift valley continents, volcanic activity is frequent. At the same time, Eurasia moved south, shrinking the Tethys Ocean. Jurassic sea levels rose, and sea lanes on the continental margins formed between North America and Europe. This period was a boom for dinosaurs and gymnosperms.
The continents began to separate
Cretaceous (140 million years ago – 66 million years ago): At the beginning of the Cretaceous Period, the continent of Gondwana was still not divided, and then South America, Antarctica, and Australia were separated from Africa, and India and Madagascar were still connected to Africa. The South Atlantic and Indian Oceans began to appear. These plate movements have created a large number of submarine mountains, which in turn has caused global sea level rise. The Tethys Ocean in the north of Africa is narrowing. The Western Inland SeaWay, which divides North America into east and west, shrinks in the late Cretaceous period, leaving behind thick marine sediments that are interspersed with coal deposits. During the highest period of sea level in the Cretaceous Period, 1/3 of the land on the surface was submerged under the ocean. In the later stages, there was an event of biological extinction, the extinction of the dinosaurs.
80 million years ago, the continental contour was basically formed
Tertiary Period (65 million years ago - 2.6 million years ago): At the beginning of the Cenozoic Era, the distribution of sea and land on the earth was larger than that of modern times, and the ancient Eurasian continent was smaller than modern; ancient China and ancient India were separated by the ancient Mediterranean, and ancient Turkey and ancient Persia were islands in the ancient Mediterranean, and these land masses had not yet been connected with the ancient Eurasian continent; the Red Sea had not yet formed, and the ancient Arabian Peninsula was a corner of ancient Africa; ancient South America and ancient North America were far apart, while ancient North America was close to and sometimes connected to the ancient Eurasian continent. Due to the extinction of the dinosaurs, mammals entered a stage of prosperity, and apes also appeared.
50 million continents of the year before
Quaternary (3 million years ago to the present): After the beginning of the Cenozoic Era, the various land masses on the surface rose and fell, constantly splitting, slowly drifting, colliding and joining, gradually forming today's sea and land distribution. The union of India with the Asian continent occurred in the Eocene 50 million years ago; the rise of the Himalayas was 2 million to 3 million years ago, and at the same time or earlier, the Alps rose in Europe and the Rockies in the Americas. The Paleogene climate is colder than before, with small ice sheets on the Antarctic continent of the Late Eocene and Oligocene, the ice sheet formed there in the middle of the Miocene is equivalent to 2/3 of the modern one, the Greenland ice sheet appeared in the northern hemisphere of the early Pleistocene, and there were many ice ages in the following 2 million years, and glaciers have been seen on several continents. In this era, human beings began to emerge, in constant evolution.
Quaternary Ice Age Earth
Late glacial period (beginning 100,000 years ago): The last period of the Quaternary Great Ice Age when the ice sheet and glaciers began to retreat. At the end of the Late Pleistocene, the world's climate warmed, and most parts of the world entered the post-glacial stage, the Quaternary Holocene. Homo sapiens (new people) formed in Africa about 200,000 years ago, and began to move out of Africa about 100,000 years ago, migrating to the world, replacing the early humans who reached the world.
Continents after glaciers