It’s hard to imagine what the UAE was like 100 years ago but what about millions of years ago, before mankind had come to the fore?
Cracking open the history books on the UAE is always interesting but picturing the past can be a challenge the further back you look.
Offering some insight into how our planet changes an American academic has created an interactive map that show planet Earth 120 million years ago.
Paleontologist Ian Webster used historic map data and GPlates, a software that visualises plate tectonics, to create the global map.
Take a look and you’ll see that the UAE looks very different, in fact Abu Dhabi and Dubai are, well, underwater.
The UAE stayed underwater until about 35 million years ago when it rose above the water in what is known as the Mid Tertiary period.
All these numbers hurting your head?
According to scientists best guesses, humans have only been around for 200,000 years so, this map goes back a long time before we started showing up.
Interested to see how the earth looked back then?
You can check it out for yourself here.
According to Webster, the map “shows that our environment is dynamic and can change,” he told CNN.
“The history of Earth is longer than we can conceive, and the current arrangement of plate tectonics and continents is an accident of time. It will be very different in the future, and Earth may outlast us all.”
We wonder what Earth will look like 120 million years in the future.
