The cloud layer on each depiction is distracting - they used the same cloud cover data from a modern year for all 30 samples. This would be much better with either no cloud cover at all or (if our climate models are good enough) realistically-modeled cloud cover for the land masses of the day.
For what it's worth, the paleogeographic maps themselves are Ron Blakey's work. The original paleogeographic maps don't have the cloud cover. Older versions (and some additional info) are available at his NAU website here: http://www2.nau.edu/rcb7/ and newer versions are his company's website: http://cpgeosystems.com/paleomaps.html
I'm curious if atmospheric conditions were taken into account such as oxygen content, solar energy, saline content and whatever else would have affected the weather.
During those times, land was a barren desert. No soil, no crawling things, no plants, just barren sand and rock. If you left an apple out in the dirt, it would grow no mold and probably just dry out. It's hard to imagine a world like that.
But imagine it you would have to. You can only speculate what it was like anyway.
If you went back in time to that era with an apple from 2011, it would still have bacteria and fungi on its surface and inside. The rotting might be slowed by a possible higher intensity of ultraviolet light from the Sun, which would kill any microbes on the surface.
What i have always found fascinating is how the biology of macroscopically large beings is so intimately intertwined at so many levels with that of the microscopic. For instance, the average human contains/carries 10x more nonhuman cells than human ones.
Do you have a source for the nonhuman cell count? That would be an excellent water cooler topic to read up on.
c'mon! while it is understandable that we all paid attention only to one lecture in the middle-school biology class - the one on human reproduction - one still is expected to remember that the life is almost 4B years old on our planet and 750M ago where would be various cell piles around thankful for the apple
Still, land was not being colonized at least until 500m years ago and substantial biomass had not accumulated until around 400 or so million years. 750m years ago there was probably not much microbial life on the continents (outside water holes or rivers, or near shores).
Interesting. Personally I was disappointed there was no snowball earth. Granted, I can imagine what it might look like but it would have been fun to see the contrast.
That may have been more than 750 million years ago.