This Tool Shows Where Your Home Was 320 million Years Ago

Your backyard has been drifting for hundreds of millions of years.

The ground beneath your feet has a travel history.

We tend to think the ground is stable and fixed, but in reality, it’s always moving, driven by the relentless forces of plate tectonics. Every year, continents move by a few centimetres. That’s too little for us to take notice, but in millions of years, the distances can become huge.

Long before our civilization existed, that patch of Earth you call home may have crossed deserts, tropical seas, and now-vanished worlds. It may have sat near the equator or drifted toward the poles. It may have been part of a continent that no longer exists in any recognizable form. An international team led by Douwe van Hinsbergen of Utrecht University thought it would be pretty cool to map that.

They’ve built a new online tool, Paleolatitude.org 3.0, that lets anyone click a place on Earth and see what latitude it occupied as far back as 320 million years ago. That may sound like a niche tool for geologists. But it answers a surprisingly personal question: where was your corner of the planet when Pangaea was coming together?

A World in Constant Motion

Earth’s crust is broken into plates that crawl, collide, and sometimes sink. This movement can be very surprising and can even fool scientists.

Take the Netherlands, for example. Geologists found 245-million-year-old rocks in the town of Winterswijk that looked exactly like the modern-day Persian Gulf—complete with desert coastlines and tropical shallows. It’s easy to draw the wrong conclusion if you only think about where the Netherlands is today. The better question, rather, is where the Netherlands was hanging out then.

“If you look in the latitude, you will see that we were then at the latitude of the Persian Gulf,” Douwe van Hinsbergen, a professor of global tectonics and paleogeography at Utrecht University, told Gizmodo. This matters a lot because latitude dictates climate, so you can infer what the climate was like at t he time, in that particular region.

It’s easy to see how this tool would be useful for geologists (professional or amateur) who want to put their findings into context. It’s also a useful educational tool for students, and a fun way to see how your region moved throughout our planet’s history.

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Tracking Earth’s Missing Pieces

This isn’t the first tool to do this.

Older versions of Paleolatitude.org could track many stable parts of continents. The new version goes further. It includes small plates, mangled mountain belts and “lost continents” that have since vanished into Earth’s interior or survived only as folded rock.

One of them, Greater Adria, once lay between Africa and Europe. Its remains now help build mountain ranges around the Mediterranean. Other vanished pieces helped shape the Himalayas and Indonesia.

“My colleagues and I have reconstructed all those regions in enormous detail,” van Hinsbergen added. “It took 10 years and a lot of nerdy work to get this done.”

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To build the model, the team first reconstructed how plates moved. Then they used ancient magnetic signals locked in rocks to place those plates at the right latitude. When some rocks form, tiny magnetic minerals inside them line up with Earth’s magnetic field. Because that field tilts differently near the equator than near the poles, those minerals can act like fossil compasses—revealing where the rock formed.

In Need of a Better Map

For paleontologists like co-author Emilia Jarochowska, this is more than a fun map—it’s a way to understand survival. By placing fossils back in their original latitudes, researchers can see which regions became uninhabitable and which served as refuges during ancient climate shifts.

But for regular users, the simple usability is a great bonus. The tool is remarkably snappy. Click a coordinate, and you get a graph showing your home’s journey toward the poles or the tropics. While it doesn’t track longitude (East-West movement is notoriously difficult to pin down for the deep past), it provides the most accurate “climate address” available for ancient life.

The model currently reaches back 320 million years, to the age of Pangaea. Van Hinsbergen hopes to extend it to about 550 million years ago, near the Cambrian explosion, when complex animal life spread rapidly through the fossil record.

“Next time you go on a trip, take a look at Paleolatitude.org to see the journey your destination has taken itself,” van Hinsbergen said in a statement.

The study was published in the journal PLOS One. Tool is at Paleolatitude.org 3.0.