This visualization is created and maintained by Ian Webster. See more of my work at ianww.com or email me at ian@dinosaurpictures.org.
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Maps from 0 to 540 million years ago are rendered from the paleo-digital elevation models of C.R. Scotese's PALEOMAP Project (Scotese & Wright, 2018, PALEOMAP Paleodigital Elevation Models for the Phanerozoic, CC BY 4.0), and locations are reconstructed with the PALEOMAP plate model. Read more about the methods here.
Maps from 560 million to 1 billion years ago are generated from the plate reconstructions of Merdith et al. (2021), A continuous, kinematic full-plate motion model from 1 Ga to present, Earth-Science Reviews 214, using GPlates. No elevation data exists for this era, so land, shelves, mountain belts (near subduction zones and where continents collide), ocean depth (from mid-ocean ridges) and coastlines (from an estimated sea level) are approximated from the model, and Snowball Earth glaciations are shown as global ice cover. These maps are a much rougher approximation than the younger ones.
Some elements of this visualization are not adjusted for time (eg. cloud and star positions). The locations are accurate to ~100 km. The coloring of the maps is based on elevation and bathymetry: dark blue = deep water, light blue = shallow water; dark green, green, tan, brown, white = ground in increasing order of elevation. Before land plants spread (roughly 470 to 400 million years ago), land is shown as bare rock.