Re: Where will my home be in a million years?

There are several ways of looking at this question.  It does have to do 
with plate tectonics and plate motions.

The easiest way to measure plate motions is to look at "relative motion"  
This is the motion of one plate that an observer standing on another plate 
would see.  For example, if you stand on the North American plate in 
California, you would see the Pacific plate moving to the north at 35 
milimeters per year (as a good rule of thumb, plates move about as fast as 
your fingernails grow.)  If you stand on the Pacific plate on the other 
hand, you would see the North American plate moving south at 35 milimeters 
per year.  

If you want to see the relative motion of any two plate, you can use theis 
web site: http://triton.ori.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~intridge/pmc/nuvel1.html

The relative motion of Wisconsin would always have to be described with 
respect to another plate.  So for example, if you were standing on the 
Pacific plate, and Wisconsin is on the North American plate, you could 
predict that Wisconsin would move north by 35 mm/year and in 1 million 
years would be 35 million milimeters or 35,000 meters, or 35 kilometers 
(~22 miles).  This calculation is really not accurate however, because 
plates move by rotating on a sphere.  Close to the point of rotation, the 
motion is slow, farther away it is fast, so you cannot really take a rate 
at the boundary and project it into the middle of the plate.

The more difficult way is to measure absolute motion.  The problem with 
absolute motion is that all the plates are moving, so there is nowhere to 
stand to measure absolute motion.  The best we can do is use things that 
move very slowly, like hotspots (such as under Hawaii.)

If you want to see the absolute motion of any point on any plate, try this 
web site: http://triton.ori.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~intridge/pmc/hs2_nuvel1.html

In this case, you can input your latitude and longitude and see your 
absolute motion.  This will tell you how far north, east, west, south or 
whatever you would move each year.  The problem with this is that the 
earth's axis of rotation slowly adjusts to the distribution of plates (to 
keep the mass concentrated around the equator), so that even if your 
absolute motion is north, your latitude might not increase.

The best bet for your question is the absolute motion calculator.

I wouldn't be surprised if you have more questions about my reply - I 
think if you send them to the MadSci site they can forward them back to me.

Good luck with your project,

Dave