The Caspian Sea is the largest lake on Earth at 386,000 km² (149,000 mi²). Lake Paratethys, which existed twelve million years ago between the Alps and Kazakhstan, covered 2.8 million km², more than seven times that size. It held more water than every modern lake combined, had its own miniature whale species, and eventually broke apart into the Caspian, the Black Sea, and the Aral Sea.
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A look at how Europe appeared 150 million years ago during the Jurassic—complete with dinosaurs, shallow seas, and scattered islands.
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The Central Pangean Mountains were a great mountain chain in the middle part of the supercontinent Pangaea that stretches across the continent from northeast to southwest during the Carboniferous, Permian Triassic periods.
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Between c. 7000 – 3000 BCE the Sahara was far from the desert it is today. It was covered in grassland and dotted with shallow lakes. Ancient humans used its waterways to travel up through Africa. Its legacy remains today in rock art and dried riverbeds. This map is a speculative reconstruction of this lost world.
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During the Ice Age, the sea level in Europe was significantly lower than it is today. The extensive ice sheets and glaciers that covered large parts of the continent locked up substantial amounts of water, causing the global sea level to drop.
Read MoreSundaland is a biogeographical region of Southeastern Asia that encompasses the Sunda shelf, the part of the Asian continental shelf that was exposed during the last glacial period of the Pleistocene, from approximately 110,000 to 12,000 years ago. It was a large region that encompassed what is now the Malay Peninsula, Borneo, Sumatra, Java, and other surrounding islands in Southeast Asia.
Read MoreDuring the last Ice Age the coast of North America looked significantly different from what it does today. The advance of massive ice sheets, primarily the Laurentide Ice Sheet, had a profound impact on the geography and appearance of the coastline. The Bering Land Bridge connected the eastern tip of Siberia to western Alaska.
Read MoreWhat did Earth look like 250 million years ago? Or 1 billion years ago? Or 4.5 billion years ago? What
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Ten thousand years ago, you could walk from Yorkshire to Denmark. Doggerland was a real place with forests, rivers, and people. Now it’s 20 meters underwater in the North Sea.
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