University of Adelaide plate tectonics video shows a billion years in under one minute

It took a long time to get here but a new project from Adelaide Uni captures the biggest moves in all of Earth’s history in just a few fascinating seconds.

University of Adelaide scientists have released a video that, for the first time, shows the movement of the Earth’s tectonic plates over the past billion years.

Thankfully, viewers get to race through the time-lapse series – which highlights Adelaide in red – in just 40 seconds.

While the video is part of a serious international research project, published in Earth-Science Reviews, it is also a bit of fun for onlookers who can understand in an instant how dynamic and interesting our planet really is.

University of Adelaide Professor Alan Collins at Cave Creek in New Zealand, February 2020. This location is close to the Australia Plate margin that runs right through New Zealand. Picture: Fionnuala Sheehan

The co-author and leader of Adelaide’s Tectonics and Earth Systems Research Group, Professor Alan Collins, said “the plates really dance around dramatically”.

He said rocks where Adelaide now stands were old enough to feature in the entire video.

“You can’t really put Melbourne and Sydney in because they’re sitting on rocks that are too young,” he said.

But the rocks that make up “the basement of Adelaide” were ancient.

“If you drilled down from the city centre, down hundreds of metres, you’d come to some quite solid crystalline shiny rocks,” Prof Collins, of the University of Adelaide, said.

“They’re part of a thing called the Gawler Craton, which is really the old part of Australia and joins on with Yilgarn Craton in Western Australia, and it’s really part of the multiple billion-year-old kernel of the continent.”

Adelaide is right on the edge of that old bit of continent, whereas everything from the Mount Lofty Ranges east is much younger. (Still old, but less than half a billion years old).

The earth 687 million years ago. The rocks of the Mount Lofty Ranges and the Flinders Ranges are being deposited and we are in the Cryogenian time period — called this because this is the coldest time we know of on Earth, when the planet was covered in ice and would have looked like a large snowball. Adelaide lay on the Australian margin of the ancestral Pacific Ocean, and Victoria and most of NSW hadn’t formed yet. Source: Prof Alan Collins, University of Adelaide.

The next big challenge is to use the modelling to work out how deep seas were and how high the mountains were through this time.

Then scientists can model the shape of the Earth’s surface over a billion years and start to put it into global climate models.

Prof Collins can envisage a three-dimensional model of plate tectonics, showing mountains rising and falling.

He describes continents as “the scum of the Earth”, literally, like the slag that rises to the surface in an iron furnace.

There have been models showing movement of the continents in the past, but this is the first showing the plates.

Lead author and creator of the video Dr Andrew Merdith began work on the project while a PhD student in the School of Geosciences at the University of Sydney.

Earth scientists from every continent have collected and published data, often from inaccessible and remote regions, that Dr Merdith and his collaborators have assimilated over the past four years to produce this billion-year model.

It will allow scientists to better understand how the interior of the Earth convects, chemically mixes and loses heat via seafloor spreading and volcanism. The model will help scientists understand how climate has changed, how ocean currents altered and how nutrients fluxed from the deep Earth to stimulate biological evolution.

Pretty amazing full plate tectonic animation of the last billion years from @AndrewMerdith - Merdith et al. 2021 (Earth Science Reviews) @MullerDietmar @EarthByteGroup @UniAdelSciences https://t.co/Plne1y1Qm7 pic.twitter.com/IIFGRaZ3vD

— Alan Collins (@geoAlanC) January 29, 2021

The earth 312 million years ago. Adelaide, along with the rest of Australia made up a part of the supercontinent Pangea (the southern bit of which is known as Gondwana). The reptilian ancestors of dinosaurs had just evolved as had the first large trees. Supplied: University of Adelaide Professor Alan Collins.

Prof Collins is thrilled with the result and the reaction to date. The original video — without the spotlight on Adelaide — has been viewed more than half a million times on YouTube, Twitter and other websites, including The New York Times.

“This is the sort of thing I’ve been working towards for 20 years,” he said.

“I’ll see out pretty much the rest of my career doing more of this, improving and working on the implications of this.”

SO WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?

“Australia is moving rapidly north and is going to be part of Asia whether we like it or not, but not in the next 100 years or so, we’re talking about the next 10 million years or so. We are rapidly moved into moving north and will sideswipe China,” Professor Collins said.

“In the future, the big unknown actually though is what’s going to happen with the Pacific, whether the Americas are going to move across the Pacific and then collide with Asia or whether the Atlantic will just close and the Americas will go back to Europe.”