This recreation of Australia breaking away from the Antarctic is 100 million years racing before your eyes.

And it reveals for the first time the puzzle of the disappearance of Australia's great inland sea.

"The puzzling thing about the Australian plate is that 100 million years ago, when sea levels were at their lowest, Australia was flooded, but then 20 million years or so later the sea levels were much higher but Australia was dry".

Like all continents, Australia is a thin crust of the lightest rock material, only about 20 to 50 kilometres deep, that drifts and bobs in response to the vast churning of the earth's internal heat engine.

And the shifting and collision of tectonic plates creates mountain ranges and volcanoes. But this didn't answer the question of why the inland sea disappeared.

So CSIRO scientists created a computer model of the changes that have occurred ever since Australia broke away from the Antarctic. And for the first time were able to see just how much it has drifted, bobbed and bent.

"Well, we took all the available data and we took a computer model of how we think the earth works and we combined those two to make a computer program that would be capable of modeling how the earth works".

The modeling showed how millions of years ago, a second tectonic plate beneath the Australian plate, sucked the landmass above it vertically downward some 350 metres, allowing the seas to flood low lying areas.

Then, as the continent drifted north gradually escaping from the influence of the underlying plate, the shallow seas that had covered it disappeared. But the layer of new sediment left behind made the land surface higher and it remained dry even when global sea levels rose once more.

This animation not only shows for the first time how our country was formed, it is expected to be a valuable tool in the hunt for oil and minerals. Helping geologists better understand how a particular piece of ground was formed and what it is likely to contain.