Scientists are among the millions of die-hard Game of Thrones fans digesting the show’s finale.
The striking landscape of Game of Thrones has led some researchers to build climate simulations that explain the erratic seasons depicted in the show, and others to piece together the geological history.
Inspired by this work, we have built the first plate tectonic reconstruction of the Game of Thrones continents. Tectonic plates are moving slabs that make up the outer layer of our planet, and behave like conveyor belts in the way they carry and drag continents around on the surface.
Even in this fantasy Game of Thrones world, geological processes like tectonic plate movement, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions would have been responsible for building the mountains, carving the rivers and creating vast oceans.