Paleogeography is the scientific study and reconstruction of past geographic configurations of Earth’s surface, including the distribution of continents, oceans, mountain ranges, basins, and depositional environments through geologic time. It integrates data from plate tectonics, stratigraphy, paleomagnetism, sedimentology, paleontology, and geochronology to infer past positions and movements of tectonic plates and associated paleoenvironments. Paleogeographic reconstructions provide essential boundary conditions for paleoclimate modeling, basin analysis, sediment routing systems, and biogeographic studies, enabling quantitative assessment of how changes in Earth’s surface configuration have influenced climate systems, ocean circulation, biodiversity patterns, and the formation and distribution of natural resources.
Hippos, today restricted to sub-Saharan Africa, survived in central Europe far longer than previously assumed. Analyses of bone finds demonstrate that hippos inhabited the Upper Rhine Graben sometime between approximately ...
Plants & Animals
Oct 10, 2025
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56
Billions of years ago, water flowed across Mars. Most scientists agree the red planet had rivers. But did those rivers flow into an ocean? New research from the University of Arkansas found strong evidence in Mars' geology ...
Astrobiology
Sep 30, 2025
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279
Dinosaurs had such an immense impact on Earth that their sudden extinction led to wide-scale changes in landscapes—including the shape of rivers—and these changes are reflected in the geologic record, according to a University ...
Earth Sciences
Sep 15, 2025
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227
About 1.1 billion years ago, the oldest and most tectonically stable part of North America—called Laurentia—was rapidly heading south toward the equator. Laurentia eventually slammed into Earth's other landmasses during the ...
Earth Sciences
Aug 18, 2025
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82
Around 800 million years ago, during the Tonian period, the Yangtze Block in South China experienced significant tectonic activity, in which the ancient supercontinent Rodinia broke off from the area that is now South China. ...
A large region of unusually hot rock deep beneath the Appalachian Mountains in the United States could be linked to Greenland and North America splitting apart 80 million years ago, according to new research led by the University ...
Earth Sciences
Jul 29, 2025
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124
Many of us have wondered what a landscape we see in a modern photograph might have looked like centuries ago. This question is especially intriguing when we know that the scenery has been radically transformed by human intervention ...
Ecology
Jul 11, 2025
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38
The remains of landscapes thought to have formed when ancient rivers flowed across East Antarctica have been discovered—and could help predictions of future loss from the ice sheet.
Earth Sciences
Jul 11, 2025
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250
Sea level on Earth has been rising and falling ever since there was water on the planet. Scientists were already able to use sediments and fossils to roughly reconstruct how sea levels changed over time steps of a million ...
Earth Sciences
Jul 7, 2025
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1642
Biogeographical regions of marine organisms, i.e., their distribution across different habitats, often overlap well with the major global ocean currents. The geological age of the currents plays a major role in this. The ...
Ecology
Jul 2, 2025
0
41
