The whole story of our planet and every living thing — on one 3D globe. Start at a ball of molten rock; press play and watch oceans form, continents drift, life spark, and creatures morph from single cells to trilobites, dinosaurs and you.
Dates, places and reconstructions are simplified approximations of a fast-moving science — the deeper the past, the fuzzier. See About & sources.
A living 4.5-billion-year atlas. Drag the timeline from the birth of the Earth to today and watch the planet come alive: a magma world cools, oceans rain down, the first cells stir, oxygen fills the sky, animals explode into being, life crawls onto land, and one lineage after another rises, spreads and falls. The continents are real — reconstructed from published plate models — so you can see Pangaea assemble and shatter beneath the creatures living on it.
Please read this: deep time is uncertain. Every date, position, temperature and boundary here is an approximation, rounded and often debated — and the further back you go, the fuzzier it gets. Before about a billion years ago there is no reliable map, so the land is shown as stylised, indicative shields, not real geography. Creatures are placed at the modern coordinates of their key fossil sites, reconstructed to their ancient positions; the silhouettes are schematic. Oxygen, CO₂ and temperature curves are simplified sketches of a complex history.
Continental reconstructions from the GPlates Web Service (Merdith et al. 2021 model). Geologic time scale after the ICS 2023 chart. Life and events compiled from the palaeontological and geological literature and cross-checked for dates. Globe: globe.gl. A companion in the 42-apps family. Made with much curiosity — and fun.