Tectonic Drift

Wherever you are standing has been somewhere else.

The continents are rafts, and the ground under your feet is a passenger. Pick a place — click the map, or use where you are — and follow that patch of crust backward. Latitude runs left to right, the equator down the middle; time runs top to bottom, the present at the top and 540 million years at the bottom. The warm band is the tropics, the cold edges the poles.

40.7° N, 74.0° W — or click anywhere on the map

younger crust

The reconstruction uses the PALEOMAP model (Scotese) via GPlates. Plate motions are confident for the last ~200 million years and increasingly speculative before that — the deep end of the ribbon is a best estimate, not a measurement. Positions are snapped to a 2° grid, so a pin resolves to roughly the nearest 150 km. Ocean floor younger than its surrounding crust simply has no deep history to show: it hadn't formed yet.