Kat Hoffman, ’07, MS ’08, stands 43 feet in the air (courtesy of a borrowed hydraulic lift), looking down on the world. North America looks a little sparse; the dozens of purple-clad South Americans dwarf their pink neighbors to the north. Africa is lying down. The shirtless boys of Australia are singing along with a bluegrass band. Clearly Earth needs some direction before history can be made.
The 200 or so people assembled at Roble Field are part of a large-scale video project that aims to recreate—with “human pixel technology”—the past and predicted future of continental drift. Inspired by a 1971 video in which Stanford students gyrated across a field to illustrate protein synthesis, the color-coded participants are walking each modern continent through its tectonic journey, to show how Gondwana and Pangaea transformed into the familiar shapes of today’s globe.
Hoffman says no one took her seriously when she proposed the idea. “I decided that if I was going to prove them wrong, [spring quarter] would be the time.” Armed with a bullhorn, she directs several run-throughs and films two successful takes; even the synchronized collapse when the gray-sweatsuit-clad asteroid cartwheels into the Yucatán at the end of the Cretaceous period goes smoothly. All seven continents are home in time for dinner. Not bad for 500 million years of geological time.
