Everything was better in the good old days.
Unfortunately, being in the middle of a continent means I’m still stuck in the middle of a continent.
Bring back the Western Interior Seaway! We only need to rewind the clock to the Cretaceous, rather than the Permian, to give me some oceanfront property.
Oceanfront?
OK, I’m hoping for a small island offshore.
I’d need a submarine.
Reunite Pangea T-shirt
As long as we don’t bring back all the big teeth from back then…
Giving my mother (living in Eastern Nebraska) a coastline would be an excellent Mother’s Day present.
I assumed you were planning on living in an octopus’s garden.
Sadly, I think the Pangaea image is more an artistic concept than geologically accurate. For example, Iceland wasn’t even begun then, let alone occupied space in the continent.
Looks good though.
I used to see the occasional bumper sticker that said…
Reunite Gondwanaland
I can see Africa from my house.
Asia has all the Himalayan rivers bending and squished, but the subcontinent of India is still ‘way off, not even at ramming speed.
#8: Not to mention the Great Lakes. While they do help orient one to the picture, they are only 14,000 years old.
We’d be living in the shadow of perhaps the most majestic mountain range on Earth (including several volcanoes).
“We only need to rewind the clock to the Cretaceous, rather than the Permian, to give me some oceanfront property.”
With a sufficient amount of AGW you may get your wish within the Holocene.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrBTM42DNzY
Hum… Looks like I’d have an easy stroll over to Italy for some dinopizza. The even better news is Ozland is still far, far, away…
#8 & #11
No, no.
We’re ‘reuinting’ now.
See the ice on Antarctica and Greenland?
Heh, still no coastline for my country, but a short drive along Austria’s lovely motorways to the Tethys sea? Perfect.
So where is the north pole on that map?
I made this for y’all, inspired by the Pangaea t-shirts.
If you pronounce “pangaea” properly, legislators in North Carolina will try to ban it.
Robert Westbrook@#19:
I laughed out loud. I even LOL’d!
janiceintoronto@18: North is up, equator is through the middle. Here’s another set of maps that makes it clearer: http://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/dynamic/historical.html
Back last century when I was a geology student, we made t-shirts that said Reunite Gondwanaland. If we were unscrupulous, we could have collected a lot of money to aid the displaced inhabitants.
Plus, Texas would be underwater so its all good.
5000 years ago or so, it was dry land to the Farrallon Islands. I would like to take that walk.
one of my favorite things I have learned about the earth is plate tectonics. It is fascinating to think about and see how all which we see that looks so permanent but really is temporary and slowly moving about the surface. To think about the distant past as being a very different place but still the result of the same forces.
uncle frogy
And as a side benefit to bringing back the Western Interior Seaway, many of the more fundie-laden populations would have to deal with the Mosasaurs.
I don’t live in the midwest but I think that’d be pretty terrible. You’d lose all that farmland that’s feeding the interior of the country in exchange for a very shallow sea. You might get some oyster beds but with the constant receding, re-flooding, receding cycles you wouldn’t get any large fish, nor would it make sense to build large ports, for either transportation or recreation.
It’d be kind of a shithole, unless you like minnow latkes and mosquito bites.
@Larry #24: Yes, I like the underwater Texas part. Give me a chance to move out first, though …
Let’s wait until after November, too. My semiannual vote against Joe Barton is coming around again soon!
“lose all that farmland that’s feeding the interior of the country”
You say that like it’s a bad thing…
My high school physics teacher had “Reunite Gondwanaland”! stencilled on the back of his lab coat. He told us he’d been counselled by his previous employer for “inappropriate political advocacy”. We lol’d.
There was also a bone dry, dusty, disused aquarium in the corner of the science lab. He’d written on the glass “Mexican invisible fish. Note the female is larger.”
@30 Well, if you put it that way…
But yeah, you’d also be unable to take large sea-faring vessels from one end to the other. There would be only treacherously navigable thinly delineated water routes deep enough, like rivers with no banks, and no place for berth if you break down. The ground below would get heavily saturated and muddied. During the dry months it would be a criss-cross of 2000 sq km of humid swampland. Flooding would prevent settlements of any permanance, at least without serious land reclamation efforts, dykes, and dams. Fishing to survive would be essential, but unfruitful, as you wouldn’t get things much larger than tadpoles and minnows or maybe piranha. Maybe crocs and turtles would take up residence in the periphery, but no mammals and the only birds would be just passing through to scavenge. To the extent certain climate conditions still apply, you’d still have waterspouts and twisters coursing through the area at the end of summer. The landscape would be quickly littered with capsized boats and makeshift shelters, some sticking out of the mud but mostly getting constantly redistributed further inland and piling up on areas of natural elevation. Eventually this would create artificial elevation and you could conceivably manage a town atop a garbage heap at the center of a swirling maelstrom of winds and shit, where it would rain mud.
I think you could make the case you’re actually better off in contemporary Texas, and that’s saying something.
taraskan@32: that sounds like heaven for birds and certain fish.
Why would it be a muddy mess? Surely there’d be plants aplenty growing, as there are in salt marshes today.
taraskan@32:
I wouldn’t be so quick to say “no mammals”. Beavers, muskrats, otters, and mink would love the environment you’re describing!
Not to mention, moose are rather fond of swamps. I think you’d find a lot more animal diversity than you might think.
And would it really be that shallow? “Interior Seaway”, home to giant crocodiles, mosasaurs, and ammonites (some of the latter a meter or more across)? If it’s deep enough for them to swim comfortably, it’s going to be open water navigable by at least small boats. And full of sizable fish.
Sounds like a very interesting environment to me!