Cenozoic Era · Paleogene Period
Earth 50 Million Years Ago: A Warm World and India Hits Asia
What Earth looked like 50 million years ago: the warmest climate of the last 66 million years, forests near the poles and India colliding with Asia.
Spin it in 3D and move through timeMap: Ancient maps: PALEOMAP PaleoDEMs (Scotese & Wright 2018), CC BY 4.0 · Natural Earth.
Around 50 million years ago, in the Early Eocene, Earth was at its warmest since the dinosaurs died. Forests grew in the Arctic, where fossils of crocodile relatives and turtles have been found on Ellesmere Island, and Antarctica had no ice sheet.
India was colliding with Asia, beginning to raise the Himalaya and the Tibetan Plateau. Australia was still joined to Antarctica.
Mammals were diversifying fast: the first horses were dog-sized, early primates lived in the forests, and the ancestors of whales, such as Pakicetus, still walked on land in what is now Pakistan.
Events of the time
India meets Asia
50 million years ago · Himalaya and Tibet
The collision is still going on: India pushes north about 4–5 cm a year, raising the Himalaya and causing earthquakes across Asia.
▶ Watch it happen on the globe
Which land was under the sea 50 million years ago?
On the map nearest this age (50 million years ago, Early Eocene), about 16% of today’s land was under the sea at some point, some 22.3 million km². That makes it number 60 of the 80 maps from 535 to 5 million years ago, which run from 2% to 50%. Each map shows the greatest flooding of its stage, so no single moment had quite this much sea.
- Tethys Ocean
Permian to Miocene · Southern Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, Iran, the Himalaya and South-East Asia
The ocean between the northern and southern continents. As Africa, Arabia and India moved north it closed, raising the Alps and the Himalaya; the Mediterranean is what is left of it.
- Turgai Strait
Jurassic to Oligocene, on and off · Western Siberia and Kazakhstan, east of the Urals
A sea east of the Ural Mountains that linked the Arctic to the Tethys and kept Europe apart from Asia for animals that could not swim. The map under-draws it.
- Trans-Saharan Seaway
Late Cretaceous to Eocene · Niger, Mali, Nigeria and Algeria
A shallow sea that crossed the Sahara from the Gulf of Guinea to the Tethys. Rocks it laid down in Mali hold fossils of giant sea snakes and large catfish. The map under-draws it.
- Mississippi Embayment
Late Cretaceous to Eocene · The lower Mississippi valley, from the Gulf of Mexico north to southern Illinois
A long bay of the Gulf of Mexico that reached up the Mississippi valley. It left the sands and clays under Mississippi, Arkansas and Tennessee.
Was it under the sea? 10 of 42 cities
| Place today | 50 million years ago |
|---|---|
| Baku, Azerbaijan | Shallow sea |
| Bangkok, Thailand | Shallow sea |
| Beijing, China | Shallow sea |
| Berlin, Germany | Shallow sea |
| Budapest, Hungary | Deep ocean |
| Cairo, Egypt | Shallow sea |
| Hannover, Germany | Shallow sea |
| London, United Kingdom | Shallow sea |
| Montgomery, Alabama, United States | Shallow sea |
| New York, United States | Shallow sea |
| Alice Springs, Australia | Land |
| Almaty, Kazakhstan | Land |
| Bismarck, United States | Land |
| Calgary, Canada | Land |
| Casper, Wyoming, United States | Land |
| Chicago, United States | Land |
| Dallas, United States | Land |
| Delhi, India | Land |
| Denver, United States | Land |
| Hays, Kansas, United States | Land |
| Johannesburg, South Africa | Land |
| Kansas City, United States | Land |
| Kathmandu, Nepal | Land |
| Madrid, Spain | Land |
| Mexico City, Mexico | Land |
| Moscow, Russia | Land |
| Nairobi, Kenya | Land |
| Niamey, Niger | Land |
| Novosibirsk, Russia | Land |
| Paris, France | Land |
| Perth, Australia | Land |
| Regina, Canada | Land |
| Richmond, Queensland, Australia | Land |
| Riyadh, Saudi Arabia | Land |
| Rome, Italy | Land |
| Salt Lake City, United States | Land |
| São Paulo, Brazil | Land |
| Tehran, Iran | Land |
| Timbuktu, Mali | Land |
| Vienna, Austria | Land |
| Warsaw, Poland | Land |
| Winnipeg, Canada | Land |
1,902 marine fossil sites in the Paleobiology Database are dated closely enough to this map. Of those on today’s land, 90% fall in its shaded sea.
Seas: Ancient seas: PaleoCoastlines v7 (Kocsis & Scotese 2021), CC BY 4.0 · Fossils: Paleobiology Database.
Part of the Cenozoic Era & The Quaternary Ice Ages.