Show HN: Today's cities on a globe of Earth's tectonic past and future

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tectonic-globe plate-tectonics paleogeography interactive-visualization pygplates earth-science

Summary

An interactive web visualization that reconstructs today's countries and cities on Earth's tectonic plates across deep time and into the future using the Merdith 2021 plate model and pyGPlates.

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Cached at: 08/09/26, 05:28 PM

# Tectonic Globe Source: [https://douwe.com/projects/tectonic_globe](https://douwe.com/projects/tectonic_globe) Today's countries and cities are used as colored crust markers\. Country polygons are split by the present\-day static polygons from the Merdith 2021 plate model, then each country\-on\-plate fragment is reconstructed backward with pyGPlates finite rotations\. The future side is a constant\-motion extrapolation from young plate rotations with a few coarse collision handoffs, so treat it as an interactive sketch rather than a forecast\. Red areas mark plate fragments that still overlap after reconstruction\. I will always love the false image I had of you\.

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