Continental drift: interactive map of Earth’s history
The world did not always look like this. Turn back time and watch landmasses travel, meet and move apart.
How to read this mapAN ATLAS IN MOTION
Move through time. Find another world.
Preparing this chapter of Earth’s history…
Motion from Cao et al. (2024). Outlines show continental blocks, including submerged parts — not exact ancient shorelines.
CAO2024 · v2.4The selected range uses a linear scale. Smooth animation does not make the reconstruction more precise.
Drag to move the map. Zoom with the wheel or two fingers. Select a name to explore its history.
What was happening?
Continents are always moving
This is the reference point for our journey. Colours distinguish model fragments, whose outlines can extend beyond today’s coastlines.
Landmasses at this time
Names guide you around the map. The model divides continents into more detailed blocks and plates.
Move the slider beneath the map. Choose an ancient landmass and discover its story.
Here you can explore positions. In Earth Year, discover the proportions of time.
Explore Earth's history in one year01 / Processes
What makes the map move?
Plate tectonics changes the neighbours of each landmass. Sea level, erosion and uplift also change coastlines.
Moving apart
Stretching crust fractures. A rift can develop into a new ocean, with new oceanic crust forming along its ridge. Fragments of an older landmass move away from one another.
Coming together
Plates converge. At subduction zones, one sinks beneath another. When continents collide, crust can thicken and rise into mountain ranges.
A new assembly
Blocks join larger landmasses or separate again. The end of Pangaea means the breakup of its arrangement, rather than the sudden disappearance of the rocks that made it.
02 / Ancient land
Continents have more than one life
Names change while pieces of crust remain. Meet the travellers in this story. The linked views are moments in a model, not exact birth dates of landmasses.
Nuna
A great arrangement of land long before Rodinia and Pangaea.
Nuna, often also called Columbia, brought ancient continental blocks together. Cao2024 places it within one reconstruction hypothesis. The broad assembly process described in Earth Year, about 2 to 1.6 billion years ago, is different from the model's Nuna stage at about 1.6 to 1.46 billion years ago.
Rodinia
Ancient pieces of crust meet in a new arrangement.
Rodinia assembled in stages over a broad interval of about 1.3 to 0.9 billion years ago. Its later breakup opened new oceans. The positions and neighbours of some blocks remain under investigation. The map shows a selected model, rather than the only possible arrangement of Rodinia.
Gondwana
The shared history of Africa, South America, Antarctica, Australia and India.
Gondwana formed through the assembly of many fragments. It later became the southern part of Pangaea, while retaining its own history. Its breakup did not separate every part at once. India travelled far north, while Australia and Antarctica gradually moved apart.
Pangaea
Most of today's land brought together in one immense arrangement.
Pangaea united most of the landmasses that are now separated. Its history is often summarised by the approximate interval from 300 to 200 million years ago. This is shorthand for prolonged assembly and breakup. The opening Atlantic gradually separated pieces of the supercontinent.
Laurasia
The northern branch of a supercontinent's breakup story.
Laurasia describes the northern arrangement associated with Pangaea's breakup, including the predecessors of North America and much of Eurasia. It was not one unchanging tectonic plate. Later rifting and collisions continued to reshape its components.
Laurentia
The geological core of much of present-day North America.
Laurentia existed both as a separate continent and as part of larger assemblies. Its name follows a geological block rather than modern political boundaries. The same piece of crust may therefore be described by its own name or by the supercontinent to which it belonged.
Baltica
An important piece of Europe's geological history.
Baltica included the ancient core of northern and eastern Europe. Its movement and collision with Laurentia belong to the story of the closing Iapetus Ocean. Modern Europe assembled from many pieces, so its entire present outline cannot be moved back through time as one unchanged continent.
Siberia
A continental core that became part of a larger Asia.
Ancient Siberia is a geological block with its own history of movement. It is not the same as the entire modern geographical region of that name. Before Asia reached its present arrangement, oceans and smaller continental fragments separated its future components.
Avalonia
A small landmass with a history recorded on both sides of the Atlantic.
Avalonia separated from Gondwana's margin and moved towards Baltica and Laurentia. Its fragments are recognised today in Europe and North America. It illustrates how modern continents are mosaics of blocks that once followed different paths. The label on this map tracks only the England–Brabant fragment, available in the selected geometry from 420 million years ago onwards. This view does not reconstruct Avalonia's earlier separation from Gondwana.
03 / Early Earth
Before we can draw a map
The first 2.74 billion years of this journey appear as process diagrams. That is about 60% of Earth's age. The exact arrangement of ancient land is outside the scope of the selected model.
- 4.54 billion years ago
A planet takes shape
Material in the young Solar System assembles into Earth. Impacts and internal heat transform its surface. Today's continents do not yet exist.
- Hadean and Archaean
Crust, water and lasting fragments
The surface cools and is repeatedly reworked. The oldest minerals and rocks offer fragmentary evidence of early crust and water. They are not enough to draw a single global map.
- Before 1.8 billion years ago
The geological record grows
Surviving cratons preserve traces of ancient collisions and movement. Hypotheses such as Vaalbara and Kenorland connect some of this evidence. They are not a sequence of established maps of the entire planet.
A small test of deep time
Read the map, test your understanding
Three short questions about moving land and the limits of our knowledge.
04 / Method and sources
What does this map actually show?
A reconstruction is a scientific model of the past. Smooth animation makes motion easier to follow, but does not make the evidence more certain.
One selected model
The last 1800 million years use the 2024 model by Cao and colleagues, data version 2.4. Its authors present the long reconstruction as a working hypothesis. Other models may position some blocks, or the entire arrangement relative to Earth's axis, differently.
A block outline is not an ancient beach
This layer follows continental-block geometry moving according to the model. It does not precisely reconstruct every ancient coastline, marine extent or mountain elevation. Continental crust can lie beneath the sea.
Time, names and confidence
Ages are given in millions of years before the present; zero marks today. Eons, eras and periods come from the site's shared geological catalogue. Supercontinent names describe groups of blocks. Naming boundaries and convenient date ranges are not sudden physical changes.
Reconstruction limit · 1800 million years ago
This is the limit of the selected model. Earlier scenes are clearly labelled diagrams. The boundary does not mark the beginning of continents or plate tectonics. Geologists are still investigating how and when the modern style of tectonics developed.
Sources and data provenance
Explore the original reconstruction, explanatory sources and geological timescale.
Reconstruction data: Cao and colleagues (2024), version 2.4, licensed under CC BY 4.0. Geometry and motion data have been processed for this visualisation, with simplification and Polish and English explanations added. Educational labels and schematic scenes were prepared by RealSize.World. The original record and licence terms are linked below.
- Cao et al. (2024): Earth's tectonic and plate boundary evolution over 1.8 billion years
- Cao et al. (2024), reconstruction data v2.4
- USGS: This Dynamic Earth
- USGS: What was Pangea?
- Nature Communications (2024): evidence for Archaean plate motions
- International Commission on Stratigraphy: International Chronostratigraphic Chart 2026/06
- Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
Questions about ancient Earth
We do not know the exact global arrangement of land throughout all 4.54 billion years. This journey combines diagrams of earlier history with a model reconstruction of the last 1.8 billion years. The earlier diagrams explain processes rather than presenting known coastlines.
No. Earlier great land assemblies included Rodinia and Nuna. Evidence becomes more fragmentary further back in time, and more details depend on the selected reconstruction.
No. A tectonic plate is a piece of lithosphere that can include both continental and oceanic crust. A continent or supercontinent may consist of many blocks. Plate boundaries, land outlines and modern political borders describe different things.
Usually its separate identity or the arrangement described by its name comes to an end. Fragments can split, collide or join other landmasses. Rocks also undergo erosion, melting and other processes, but a disappearing map label does not mean an entire continent was suddenly destroyed.
The outlines in this tool help track continental blocks within the selected model. They do not reconstruct every sea-level change or the exact shape of historical coastlines. That kind of palaeogeography requires separate data.
Geologists combine many clues, including the magnetic record in rocks, rock ages and structures, ancient mountain belts, fossils and traces of movement on the ocean floor. A reconstruction must reconcile these clues; incomplete evidence can allow more than one solution.