MapTime lives!

It’s fair to say that MapTime has been somewhat neglected in the past couple of years, now that the core team is spread over three continents. However, having given the website a long overdue look over today (after it went down a while ago), I am pleased to report that it still works! I even added a new TimePoint to the Organic Evolution TimeLine.

MapTime is back online!

After a minor server hacking incident (not directed at the website itself), the MapTime website (www.maptime.co.uk) is back up and running. This seemed like a good excuse for a quick plug. I've posted before about this useful resource we are developing for visualising "Deep Time" using Google Maps and showed how it could be applied to YEC and Giant's Causeway. There is a more detailed How to use MapTime post on the MapTime blog, or just visit maptime.co.uk and have a play! Feedback and suggestions welcome!

How wrong is the Young Earth Creationist age for the Giant's Causeway?

I've made a couple of posts recently about the National Trust having a part of their Giant's Causeway visitor centre exhibit that mentioned the Young Earth Creationist (YEC) belief that the causeway was created during the Flood, rather than approx. 60 million years ago as the scientific evidence supports - first, in support of the National Trust and then revisiting that support in the light of more information.

For balance, and just to emphasise my general lack of support for the YEC position, I want to highlight why so many scientists (including me) get upset if Young Earth Creationism is ever presented as science. There is no scientific controversy over the age of the Giant's Causeway or the Earth, at least not at the level of disparity that YECs are talking about. Opinions may differ by a few million years - it is not possible to date with zero margins of error - but this is not the same as saying that a "Biblical" Young Earth or "Flood Geology" has any scientific support at all. It simply doesn't.

Just in case there is any confusion about just how wrong the Young Earth Creationist position is, here is a MapTime illustration (click to enlarge) of the age of the Earth using the journey from St Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin (as an arbitrary famous landmark) to the Giant's Causeway (or as close as you can get by road). Taking the driving route recommended by Google, this is a journey of 263.14km.
The current implementation of MapTime only supports one TimeLine, so I was not able to plot exactly the Biblical Flood at 4359 years ago or the geological age of the Causeway at 50-60 million years ago but I have left the earliest writing (5000 years ago) and the K/T Extinction (65 mya) marked.

There are couple of things to notice. One, is that even though the Giant's Causeway seems old to us - and over 10,000 times older than YECs claim - it is actually quite young by Earth standards and would not appear on the journey from Dublin until just past Bushmills, about 2.51km - 3.13km south of the Causeway:

The Earth is old.

The second thing is not so clear from the map but can be gleaned from the table of distances, below: if I was to put my size 11 foot down, I would have already over-shot the Biblical flood, which lies about 25.3 centimetres away, by a few centimetres. Literal Biblical creation itself falls only 46.4cm away from the end of the 263km journey. The YEC error is like confusing something 2.5km long with something 25cm long. That's quite a big error. (It's worse than Father Ted explaining perspective to Dougal.)

Event	Distance	Years
Present Day	0 mm	2012 AD
Cold War Ends	1.33 mm	1989 AD
Hiroshima	3.88 mm	1945 AD
Writing	29.0 cm	5 kya
Biblical Creation	46.4 cm	6000 BC
K/T Extinction	3.77 km	65 mya
Permian Extinction	14.5 km	250 mya
Cambrian Explosion	31.0 km	535 mya
Multicellularity	52.2 km	900 mya
First Eukaryotic Cells	115.9 km	2 bya
Single Celled Life	202.9 km	3.5 bya
Formation of Earth	263.1 km	4.54 bya

We are not talking about some minor reinterpretations of data, here. We are talking about a total disregard for the accumulated scientific knowledge of decades to centuries. This is why it is so important that YEC is represented for what it is: a religious position, not a scientific one.

(Created using MapTime. See the MapTime Blog for instructions how to visualise Deep Time on a journey with more relevance to you.)

MapTime: visualising Deep Time using Google Maps

A couple of days ago, I blogged that MapTime was coming soon... So, what is MapTime?

MapTime is a website that we are developing to make time lines as described in:

Parker, J. D. (2011) Using Google Earth to Teach the Magnitude of Deep Time. Journal of College Science Teaching 40(5): 23-27

The paper was featured in a Science 2011 Editor's Choice, "A destination in time." (Science 332: 1360.)

Evolution took a long time to happen and humans are not really built to intuitively grasp how long that time really was. By using Google Earth, (or Google Maps in the case of the website,) one is able to plot a route between two locations that resonate with students by showing key dates along the way using a comprehensible scale. This allows them to "feel" the magnitude of deep time.

An example route between Big Ben in London and to the entrance of Southampton Bargate reveals how the analogy works:

On route from Big Ben, as this graphic shows:

• Life begins on the M25 at Heathrow
  
• Multicellular animals do not arise until just south of Winchester.
  
• The age of the Dinosaurs runs from around the M3/M27 junction down the Inner avenue to Middlestreet
  
• Humans first appear about 18 and a half feet in front of the Bargate
  
• British life expectancy (80 years) is the thickness of a eurocent coin from the front of the Bargate.

Now imagine driving 70 mph through the single celled phase of life from the M25 along the M3 to Winchester with a human lifespan the thickness of a eurocent coin.

Visit the MapTime Blog and subscribe to keep abreast of new developments - including the imminent launch of the website! The last few bugs are being ironed out and then we will be looking for interested testers. (And, of course, you can watch this space too!)

Coming soon...