Cretaceous / Tertiary Boundary (65 million years ago)

Spin and Rotate the Virtual Globe

(to spin globe, hold mouse-button down and drag mouse up or down across globe)

(Read the explanation below, while you wait for the animation to load.)

You can interactively manipulate and rotate this paleo-globe, and view the Earth from the North Pole to the South Pole, and from the eastern edge of Asia to the western edge of North America. To interactively grab and rotate the globe, hold down mouse-button and drag mouse up and down across the globe.

This globe shows the location of the continents and the shape of the ocean basins 65 million years ago at the end of the Cretaceous period. This was the time when the dinosaurs were wiped out by the impact of an asteroid. The impact site, Chicxulub crater, is the black dot along the northern edge of Yucatan. The positions of the continents were quite different than to today's world. The North Atlantic was just beginning to open, India had not yet collided with Asia, much of Europe was flooded by the ocean, and Australia was still attached to Antarctica.

The colors represent the depth of the ocean (dark blue - deep oceans, light blue - very shallow seas). The color of the land areas represents elevation (green - lowlands, browns - highlands, and white - high mountains). The large dark blue areas adjacent to some of the continents represents ocean floor that has been subducted. The width of these areas illustrates how fast subduction is recycling material back into the Earth. This 3D topographic and bathymetric model is based primarily on the digital elevation information from Smith and Sandwell (1997), with additional digital elevation information for the Arctic Ocean from Jakobsson et al. (2000), for Greenland without ice from Bamber et al. (2000), and for Antarctica without ice from the British Antarctic Survey (BEDMAP).

Some interesting places to check out: Tibetan plateau is missing, the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden are closed, no Arctic islands or Hudson's Bay, Florida is flooded, much of Europe is flooded, and the South Atlantic Ocean is much narrower..

A screen-sized version of this VR Globe is available on CD-ROM in both Quicktime and html (Java applet) format. For more information see Teaching Materials.

Images and animations of PALEOMAP Paleoglobes can be licensed for use in textbooks, museum exhibits, and educational CD-ROMs.

This page uses a java applet that displays a VR model. Visit FreedomVR at www.honeylocust.com/vr/ for more information about this applet.