500-million-year gap in Earth's history

[Neferti]

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-27/m ... ry/8655196

Earth is estimated to be around 4.5 billion years old, with life first appearing around 3 billion years ago.

To unravel this incredible history, scientists use a range of different techniques to determine when and where continents moved, how life evolved, how climate changed over time, when our oceans rose and fell, and how land was shaped.

Tectonic plates — the huge, constantly moving slabs of rock that make up the outermost layer of the Earth, the crust — are central to all these studies.

Along with our colleagues, we have published the first whole-Earth plate tectonic map of half-a-billion years of Earth history, from 1,000 million years ago to 520 million years ago.

We now have a map of plate tectonics for the period 1,000-520 million years ago.

Map and more information at the above link.

[Super Nova]

Pretty cool how they have worked all this out. The plate movement was a major discovery at the time. It then explained the distribution of live and help us understand evolution when animals are separated by distance and time.

Cool video of the movements. It is like a dance.