Where Would I Be…?
Winding the clock…
The ground under your feet is moving — about as fast as your fingernails grow. Pick a spot and we’ll run the clock forward.
All off by default. The globe reads more clearly without them.
The ground under you is moving. Not metaphorically — about as fast as your fingernails grow. Wait long enough and it ends up somewhere else entirely.
Each tectonic plate behaves like a rigid cap on a sphere, turning about a fixed axis called an Euler pole. Give a plate its pole and its rate, and the whole future (and past) of every point on it is one rotation. This app uses NNR-MORVEL56 — 56 plates, published by Argus, Gordon & DeMets in 2011 — together with Peter Bird's PB2002 plate outlines.
Boundary colours aren't painted on. For every segment of every plate outline the app samples the crust either side, works out the relative velocity of the two plates, and splits it into opening and sliding. That is why the East Pacific Rise glows and the Japan Trench does not.
The model describes motion averaged over roughly the last 780,000 years. Running it forward assumes plates never change course, never jam, and never break — which is exactly what they always do. Treat a thousand years as solid, a million as fair, fifty million as a decent story, and anything past that as a very well-informed daydream.
If you share your location it is used in the browser and nowhere else. There is no server, no analytics, and no network request carrying your coordinates. The place names come from a gazetteer bundled with the app.
Built for fun. Not for navigation, land registry, or arguing with your neighbour about where the fence goes in 40 million years.