How to drive the Earth 🌍

Scrub through 540 million years. Drag the bar at the bottom, tap a coloured era, or press ▶ to play. The coloured stripes are geological periods; the white ticks are big events (hover them). The right edge is today; the far left is the Cambrian.

Watch the continents move. As you go back, the seven continents slide together into one giant landmass — Pangaea — then keep going. Real coastlines, carried on real tectonic plates.

Three map overlays. Land shows land, sea and ice. Climate paints every spot by the weather it would have. Biomes shows the living world — rainforest, desert, taiga. Scrub with one on and the bands rearrange as the land drifts.

Point & Ask. Click anywhere on the globe (or pick a place in the panel and use your keyboard) and the card answers: where am I, what's the climate, how long is the day, which plate am I riding, and why.

Fossils & resources. Pins for famous fossils, coal, oil, asteroid craters and giant volcanoes. Each one vanishes if you scrub to before it formed — tap one to leap to its moment.

Honest model note: this is a teaching globe. The continents follow real plate motions but the exact positions are schematic, not laboratory paleo-coordinates. The climate comes from open formulas you can read under ⚙.

Got it

⚙ The recipe

Nothing here is faked. The climate colours come from these two formulas, evaluated at every point from its latitude, its continentality (0 = coast, 1 = deep interior) and elevation. Edit them and the globe re-colours.

Mean annual temperature °C = f(lat, cont, elev) Annual precipitation (0–1 proxy) = f(lat, cont, elev)

The plate model

Continents are real modern coastlines (Natural Earth) carried back on tectonic plates. Each plate rotates about an Euler pole — identity today, reaching a Pangaea configuration at Ma, interpolated smoothly between. Approximate, but the story (Atlantic closing, Gondwana assembling, India's long journey north) is real.

This globe needs 3D graphics

Your browser couldn't start WebGL, so the spinning Earth can't load. Try a different browser (Chrome, Edge, Firefox or Safari), turn on hardware acceleration, or open this on another device. Everything else here works the same once 3D is available.