A NEW atlas shows Zimbabwe, Russia’s Kola Peninsula and Quebec, Canada, as next-door neighbours – as they were 2.5 billion years ago. The map could reveal the location of valuable mineral deposits.
“We’re completing the plate tectonic revolution,” boasts Richard Ernst, a geology consultant in Toronto, Canada, who heads the mapping project.
That revolution started in the 1960s, when it was realised that the continents had broken apart from a 250-million-year-old supercontinent called Pangaea. But there has never been a definitive map of earlier supercontinents that existed more than 500 million years ago.
Last week, Ernst told a meeting of the…
