Like film stills from a 600-million-year-old blockbuster, Blakey's maps take us back to the Precambrian-but there are much older eras still, stretching unmapped into far earlier continents and seas, and there are many more billions of years of continental evolution to come.
#WIKIMAPIA MAPS OF 10 YEARS AGO SOFTWARE#
Venue met with Blakey in his Flagstaff home to talk about the tectonic processes that make and remake the surface of the Earth, the difficulty in representing these changes with both scientific accuracy and visual panache, and the specific satellite images and software tools he uses to create his unique brand of deep-time cartography. The first map shows the land 510 million years ago, progressing from there-reading left to right, top to bottom-through the accretion and dissolution of Pangaea into the most recent Ice Age and, in the final image, North America in its present-day configuration. These images come from Ron Blakey's maps of the paleotectonic evolution of North America. Southwest-where Blakey still lives, in Flagstaff, Arizona-these visually engaging reconstructions of the Earth's distant past show how dynamic a planet we live on, and imply yet more, unrecognizable changes ahead. With a particular emphasis on North America and the U.S. Catalogued on his website, Colorado Plateau Geosystems, these maps show the world adrift, its landscapes breaking apart and reconnecting again in entirely new forms, where continents are as temporary as the island chains that regularly smash together to create them, on a timescale where even oceans that exist for tens of millions of years can disappear, leaving only the subtlest of geological traces. The paleo-tectonic maps of retired geologist Ronald Blakey are mesmerizing and impossible to forget once you've seen them. The west coast of North America as it appeared roughly 215 million years ago (map by Ron Blakey)
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