How does the passage of time affect the latitude and longitude of a location on the surface of the earth?

Answer 1

We like to think of the Earth as solid, but that's only approximately correct. The Earth is a ball of liquid (or at least, viscous) magma in the mantle of the Earth, covered by dozens of "plates". Think of it as the shell on a cracked egg; over long periods of time, the various plates move about on the Earth. This is called "plate tectonics", and until about 1950 was reviled and ridiculed as a "pseudo-science" that couldn't possibly be true.

(In that regard, much like the wild hare-brained scheme that an asteroid might have smacked into the Earth and killed off the dinosaurs. The NERVE of those people!)

We now believe (we don't "know", just as we can't be positively certain of most things) that the plates rubbing against each other causes vibrations that we call "earthquakes", and that some plates are riding up over others; the upper plate forms mountains, while the lower plates are pushed back down into the magma. This is happening in the "Ring of Fire" of earthquakes and volcanoes all around the Pacific Ocean. In the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, the plates are spreading S...L...O...W...L...Y apart and rising magma is forming new crust in the Mid-Atlantic Trench.

So, any location on the Earth's surface is actually moving, microscopically, all the time. When it stops moving completely, the plates build up a lot of stress and are more likely to crack suddenly and jump; these are BIG earthquakes.

This is, we believe, why the eastern coastline of South America matches up so closely with the western coastline of Africa; many millions of years ago, they were connected, and split apart.