Presentation: Living Earth for Deep-time: Understanding the Earth's Evolving Geography and Climate for the Last 545 Million Years

Plate tectonics movements shape the surface of our Earth over geological time scales (millions to billions of years), and are responsible for the formation of mountains, oceanic basins and the shape of continents. The long-term dynamics of the Earth system, such as in the biogeochemical cycles or the constant evolution of geography/topography, are also known to be strongly controlled by tectonic activity. Using plate tectonic models, the Earth’s past geography can be reconstructed into palaeo Digital Elevation Models (palaeo-DEMs) that account for past sea-level changes and depict changes in ocean-continents distribution. Users of these products, such as climate modellers interested in understanding the Earth’s past climates, require metrics and analytical solutions to describe the palaeo-DEMs and the changes from one reconstruction to the next. While relatively straightforward to compute static indicators for one single map and plot evolutions over time (e.g., of global oceanic area or high altitudes regions), understanding and representing transitions within and between states (e.g., land and water) has not yet addressed in palaeogeography. With this case study, we present an application of the Living Earth framework to deep-time palaeogeographic maps, focusing on 45 time steps spanning the Phanerozoic era (last 545 million years), as a complement to existing static geographic indicators.