Thanks — below was written by ChatGPT then edited by me.
On the viewer: the page you saw is basically just a GeoJSON viewer. Once a file is loaded, the features are not freely movable in the way they would be in a drawing program. The coordinates are already baked into the GeoJSON, so the viewer is just rendering them where the file says they go. I can rotate the globe, turn layers on and off, change views, compare files, etc., but I cannot just grab Australia or Antarctica and drag it around inside that viewer.
What I can do is ask AI / scripts to rewrite the GeoJSON coordinates and generate a new file. So the workflow is more like: inspect the geometry, identify what needs to change, then have the coordinates transformed, morphed, split, repaired, or reprojected into a new GeoJSON. Then I reload that new file and see what happened.
That is also why I built a separate clicker-type tool. The page you saw is not really the clicker app (I think). The clicker app is more of a diagnostic / control-point tool. It lets me mark coordinates, click features, snap to line segments, pair features between two files, and export those clicks as JSON instructions. Then those clicks can be used by AI/scripts to rewrite the underlying GeoJSON more intelligently.
You can try the viewer here:
https://expandingearth.science/wireframe3
Right now it is still mostly a viewer, not a full editing program. But if the map-style view you’re using would be helpful, I can probably add that as another mode. It would make sense to have a 3D globe view, a normal 2D map view, and maybe a side-by-side comparison view (why did it never suggest this previously?) for exactly this kind of reconstruction problem.
On the Antarctica/Australia issue, I don’t really have a position on that. My view at is that the seafloor isochrons are the roadmap. Any proposed movement, rotation, deformation, or fit has to make sense against the isochron pattern, fracture zones, and spreading history. I still haven’t been able to get any AI system to work it all out yet.
There is a continent-size issue that I can point out. At the oldest frame, a 2D fixed-Earth-style reconstruction is going to depict the continents as too small relative to the smaller globe being modeled. On a smaller Earth, the same continental crust occupies a much larger percentage of the total surface area. Since surface area scales with radius squared, reducing the radius means the continents should cover much more of the map.
So if the continents are carried over with roughly modern/fixed-Earth map footprints, they are underrepresented in later scenes. By the end, essentially the whole map should be filled. That makes the remaining gaps look artificially large. Some of the apparent South Pacific gap may therefore be a real fitting problem, but some of it may simply be that the continents have not been allowed to occupy the share of the smaller globe that they should occupy.
That is what I’m trying to work through now: not just rotating pieces until they look better, but rebuilding the frames so the isochrons guide the reconstruction and the continental crust is represented at the correct relative size for each smaller radius.