An international team of earth scientists led by Utrecht professor Douwe van Hinsbergen has developed an online tool that allows you to see, for any given location on Earth, what latitude it occupied in the distant past, right back to the heyday of the supercontinent Pangaea 320 million years ago. The basis for this is the Utrecht Paleogeography Model, which enables by far the most detailed reconstruction of complex mountain ranges and vanished tectonic plates. The unprecedented accuracy of this tool offers countless possibilities, such as for reconstructions of the development and resilience of biodiversity and lays the foundation for our understanding of climate evolution. “Next time you go on a trip, take a look at Paleolatitude.org to see the journey your destination has taken itself.”
Latitude determines the angle of the sun’s rays and thus also the local climate. Earth scientists who reconstruct the climate of the distant past from traces in rocks therefore need to know where those rocks were located at the time. And that is often not the same place as today, because the tectonic plates may have travelled considerable distances. For example, geoscientists from Utrecht are studying 245-million-year-old flora and fauna in Winterswijk (The Netherlands), which lived in an environment very similar to today’s Persian Gulf: desert and tropical sea. Is that because global climate was so much warmer back then? Or was the Netherlands situated at the same latitude as Arabia? Six years ago, they had already demonstrated that the latter was the case.
A step forward
In the not-too-distant past, geoscientists in Utrecht had already attempted to capture this kind of reconstruction within a single model. Now there is a new model that is far more refined: the researchers have, as it were, significantly increased the resolution of their reconstructions. For instance, the movements of small tectonic plates have now been incorporated, as well as those of ‘lost continents’. The latter, such as Greater Adria , the Tethys Himalayas or Argoland , have left their mark in the form of folded rocks in the mountain ranges of the Mediterranean, the Himalayas, and Indonesia respectively. Van Hinsbergen: “This means that, for the first time, a truly global model is now available that allows you to link those rocks to their original plates, which have since disappeared into the Earth’s mantle. The global journey of those rocks can now also be traced.”
Magnetic field
These palaeogeographic reconstructions are created in two key steps. Van Hinsbergen first built reconstructions showing how plates moved relative to one another, by, as it were, ‘unfolding’ the folded rock in the mountains caused by the shifting plates and laying them side by side. “But then that entire reconstruction needs to be placed at the correct latitude. That is important for climate research, for example,” explains co-author Bram Vaes, who works at the CEREGE research institute in Aix-en-Provence, France. For the second step in the reconstruction, geoscientists therefore make good use of the magnetic information stored in ancient rock. “Because the angle formed by the Earth’s magnetic field and the Earth’s surface changes gradually from the poles towards the equator and is therefore linked to latitude. And many rocks contain magnetic minerals that ‘recorded’ the direction of the magnetic field at that location when the rock was formed. So, using this, we can determine at what latitude such a rock was formed.” Combined with methods for determining the age of rocks, geoscientists can thus paint a detailed picture of the movements made by the tectonic plates, and the rocks upon them.
Biodiversity
This model and the accompanying web tool also have other applications. All those folded rocks in mountain ranges are rich in fossils. Thanks to the improved web application on Paleolatitude.org, paleontologists can now use their finds to determine in detail how biodiversity has developed across different latitudes and thus in different climates through time. “This allows us, for example, to show what happened to global biodiversity during and after mass extinctions in the past, for instance due to the Earth rapidly warming or cooling” says co-author Emilia Jarochowska, a paleontologist at Utrecht University. “Which latitudes became uninhabitable first, and which became refuges? Which species migrated, which adapted, and which went extinct?” Although scenarios exist for the well-known mass extinctions, these were difficult to test due to uncertainty about the paleogeographical position of the fossils. “With the new model, we have much greater certainty, and our understanding of biodiversity is shifting from one-dimensional – that is, solely over time – to three-dimensional, encompassing space as well. This enables us to draw important lessons for the resilience of biodiversity in the present.”
The model goes all the way back to the heyday of the supercontinent Pangaea, 320 million years ago. In the future, it will be extended back to the ‘Cambrian explosion’ of complex life, 550 million years ago.
PLOS One
Data/statistical analysis
Not applicable
Paleolatitude.org 3.0: a calculator for paleoclimate and paleobiology studies based on a new global paleogeography model
29-Apr-2026