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Late Cretaceous (early Campanian,  80 million years ago)

(c) PALEOMAP Project, 2003

(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 80 million years ago near the end of the Cretaceous period.   At this time sea level was much higher (~200 m) and the continents were flooded by shallow seas.  A mid-continent seaway connected the Gulf of Mexico with the Arctic ocean.   Dinosaurs living on the western shores the seaway had more in common with dinosaurs in Asia that with dinosaurs from eastern United States.  Also notice that the positions of the continents were quite different than they are today.   The North Atlantic was closed,  India was just beginning to rift away from Madagascar and had not yet collided with Asia, South America was much closer to Africa, 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, most of the continents are flooded, and the there was no ice cap at the poles.

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.