Before there were the continents, there was Pangea. Two hundred million years ago, the enormous land mass began to break apart and we’ve been separated ever since — but a map tool can help you find where a given town would have been on the supercontinent.
This ancient earth tool is a rotating view of the world at various points in time. You can select the time period (“what did the Earth look like 750 million years ago?”) or search by event, such as “first multicellular life” or “first insects.” To figure out where you would have lived on Pangea, input your address and select “Pangea supercontinent” from the options on the far right.
My hometown in California, as it turns out, was still a coast. But my current location in New York was on a strip of land that had the northeastern US (obviously) on one side, and Morocco on the other.
If stepping through time isn’t enough, the Antipodes map lets you input a location and find the exact other location on Earth. The antipode of my location in New York is some water near Australia, while the antipode of my hometown is… some water near the southern tip of Africa. But the antipode of the hospital where I was born, in central China, is a place in northern Argentina. That’s more like it.
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