Fyi: Could not resolve location for "Banjar Bangli, Bali, ID", "We haven't tracked its tectonic plate that far into the past - try a later year!", even for "first hominids".

EDIT: Oh, I see. It does exist for 0 Ma. Perhaps add a 0 Ma "present" item to the "Jump to" pulldown? <strike>Perhaps prune cities for which only 0 Ma data exists?</strike> Random thoughts. Thanks for your thing.

That's because Bali formed just a few million years ago, very recently in geological terms!

Ah, it's apparently Eurasian plate Cenozoic ocean floor uplifted by Indo-Australian plate subduction, with volcanism. Neat. Could one of those plates be used going backward?

That's a really cool map. I'd love to be able to click a button and have it show the locations of (say) major world cities, so that I can see surprising adjacencies. So if I look up the location of my hometown 300 million years ago, I can see if there's any places it is far away from today that it was actually much closer to then. It'd help contextualise the location you've entered.

Perhaps a game? Perhaps of minimizing inter-city walking/swimming/flying physical travel, for time travelers whose position when time traveling is anchored to the plate? So "Start at city A. ... Now, fly to Mumbai, and ride it time-forward across the Tethys Sea to Asia. Then fly to D, time-backwards to Gondwana, and fly to E (goal). Distance flown: N km. Distance drifted: N km. Time traveled: N Ma."

Note that the existing app can simultaneously show more than one city. I missed that at first.

It's nice!

I was struck by how rolling back 150 million years ago, South America and Africa were part of the same land mass (that is, the Atlantic Ocean had disappeared) but the British Isles was still separate from Europe.

meta: first time I've seen an article on HN with a link back to the same HN comment section.

edit - correction - to an earlier thread

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17286770