<story><title>Map Shows How a Location Has Changed over the Past 750M Years</title><url>https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/map-lets-you-plug-your-address-see-how-neighborhood-has-changed-over-past-750-million-years-180971507/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>typpo</author><text>Hi all, I built this using an existing model called PALEOMAP [1].  Geologists use desktop software called GPlates that defines a &amp;quot;rotation file&amp;quot; format describing the movement of tectonic plates.  I wrote code that uses this file to reverse the rotation of latlng coordinates at arbitrary moments in time.&lt;p&gt;You used to be able to enter an exact address on this site, but the server would overload under heavy traffic as the rotation calculations are CPU intensive (geocoding is also expensive).  I solved this problem by precomputing a grid of transformations across 26 out of the 91 available moments in time and reducing the geocoding resolution to about 200,000 cities.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.earthbyte.org&amp;#x2F;paleomap-paleoatlas-for-gplates&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.earthbyte.org&amp;#x2F;paleomap-paleoatlas-for-gplates&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>Map Shows How a Location Has Changed over the Past 750M Years</title><url>https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/map-lets-you-plug-your-address-see-how-neighborhood-has-changed-over-past-750-million-years-180971507/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>b2ccb2</author><text>Link to the actual interactive map: &lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;dinosaurpictures.org&amp;#x2F;ancient-earth#0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;dinosaurpictures.org&amp;#x2F;ancient-earth#0&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>