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Beware_the_Voodoo t1_ixz5265 wrote

I dont see how it's possible to accurately answer this question. If they could say how inaccurate the current maps are they could have made maps that were accurate to begin with.

The best anyone could say is that the current maps of that time period are the best estimations that could be made with all available evidence. Which is exactly what they are saying.

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Willben44 t1_ixz87og wrote

I mean, say you knew that there was a certain variance in the estimates of where things were back then you could have the intuition to answer. If it’s high, then our maps wouldn’t be very useful (though there is a probability of it being exact) and if low then they could still be useful.

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CrustalTrudger t1_ixzhsbn wrote

> If they could say how inaccurate the current maps are they could have made maps that were accurate to begin with.

It's very possible to know something within a given uncertainty, still be able to quantify that uncertainty, but not be able to completely eliminate that uncertainty. If we take for example the paleomagnetic measurements underlying many paleogeographic reconstructions, it is definitely possible to estimate the uncertainty, and propagate that uncertainty into uncertainty in paleogeographic locations (e.g., Heslop & Roberts, 2020). The extent to which that uncertainty can be reduced will be fundamentally limited by both epistemic (which we can reduce by collecting more data) and aleatory uncertainty within the paleomagnetic measurements. Additionally, there will be a fundamental limit in terms of how much we can reduce the epistemic uncertainty because of the limited availability of preserved rocks. Not all steps in paleogeographic reconstructions lend themselves to as direct uncertainty estimation as the paleomagnetic components, but it's not fair to say that there is no way to characterize uncertainty in these products.

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