A digital twin of the ancient Earth has been created, a virtual copy of the planet that allows you to go back in time up to 100 million years ago.
It is the most detailed model of the planet ever made, obtained by combining information on the events that shape our planet, such as climate and tectonics, and which allows us to reconstruct the past as well as to outline the future.
It was created by an international collaboration led by Tristan Salles, of the Australian University of Sydney, and published in the journal Science.
That of digital twins, or digital twins, is one of the possibilities that has opened up in recent years above all thanks to supercomputers, machines capable of processing enormous quantities of data and manipulating information such as to create a practically perfect but digital copy of the real world .
Machinery, aircraft turbines and complex objects are now increasingly studied by creating digital twins because by simulating their behavior in detail it is possible to improve them without having to do too many experiments in the real world;
it is also possible to predict the wear of the various components.
But the complexity of the work increases in proportion to the complexity of the object to be reproduced: this is why it is an ambitious goal to create digital twins of the Earth,
"To predict the future, we need to understand the past," said Salles, and it is precisely in this perspective that the researchers are committed to reconstructing the geological history of the Earth in unprecedented detail.
Until now there was a lot of information on the planet's climatic and geological evolution, often collected in a fragmentary and not very homogeneous form, but thanks to this great and patient analysis work it was possible to reconstruct all the phenomena relating to the last 100 million years in a single model .
The result is an instrument that allows you to virtually visualize the entire planet and the changes that have occurred over time, with a detail that reaches just 10 kilometres.
The data show, for example, the interaction between seas and river basins,
in which the disposition of sediments plays a fundamental role in modeling the coast;
they also reconstruct the tectonic movements, such as those that brought out the Italian peninsula, or the changes in the climate or the chemistry of the oceans.
The research also provides a more efficient model for understanding how terrestrial sediment transport regulates the planet's carbon cycle over millions of years.
But having a clear picture of the past can go a long way in making predictions about the future, for example to test theories about how the earth's surface will respond to climate change and tectonic forces.
"Our work - said Salles - provides a basis for scientists in other fields to prepare and test hypotheses, such as for the study of biochemical cycles or biological evolution".
"It is not only a tool to help us investigate the past - she concluded - but it will also help us understand and predict the future".