What Earth Looked Like 200 Million Years Ago

The world map you grew up with feels permanent. In geological time, it is anything but. Go back 50 million years and India is an island racing across the ocean. Go back 200 million years and almost all the land on Earth is fused into one supercontinent. Go back further and the planet may have been covered in ice from pole to equator. In this documentary we follow Alfred Wegener, the scientist nobody believed, and the seafloor discoveries by Marie Tharp and others that proved him right: a mountain range splitting the Atlantic, magnetic stripes recorded in stone, and the slow conveyor belt of plate tectonics. Then we see what moving continents do to the planet: Pangaea's extreme climate, the birth of the Atlantic, the collision that raised the Himalayas (with sea fossils near the top of Everest), the land bridge of Panama, the Mediterranean drying out and refilling, Snowball Earth, and the future supercontinents that could make Earth too hot for mammals. ⏱️ CHAPTERS 00:00 The map that falls apart 01:14 The man nobody believed 03:11 The ocean floor 05:09 Plate tectonics 06:38 Pangaea 09:18 The collision 10:38 The bridge 12:05 The sea that vanished 12:55 The thermostat and Snowball Earth 14:56 Young ocean, old planet 16:09 It's not finished 📚 IMAGE CREDITS• Wikimedia Commons: Alfred Wegener and the 1930 Greenland expedition (public domain) · Marie Tharp (CC0) · Snider-Pellegrini / Wegener fossil map (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Pangaea maps and continental drift animation (CC0) · Mesosaurus (CC BY 4.0) · Glossopteris (CC BY 2.0) · tectonic plates map, USGS (public domain) · Atlantic bathymetry and age of the ocean floor, NOAA · Thingvellir and Iceland's Mid-Atlantic Ridge (CC BY-SA 3.0 / CC BY 2.0 / CC BY-SA 4.0) · Mount Everest by Luca Galuzzi (CC BY-SA 2.5) · Messinian salinity crisis map (CC BY-SA 3.0) · Snowball Earth illustration (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Dickinsonia (CC BY-SA 3.0) · Acasta gneiss (CC BY 2.0) · fossils and skeletons (CC0 / CC BY 4.0 / CC BY-SA 4.0) · full list in the project credits file• Satellite and ISS imagery: NASA (public domain)• Stock footage: Pixabay 🎵 MUSIC (Pixabay Content License)Epic Trailer · Lost Abyss Soundtrack — MiguelBono · IntoTheAbyss — WelbornWorks · Abyssal Echoes — Fopihe · Deep Abyss — NaturesEye · Before the Sun — Music_for_Creators #platetectonics #pangaea #geology #earthhistory #science #documentary #continentaldrift