About this project
WhenEarth is an interactive 3D globe that lets you scrub through 750 million years of Earth's history — watch continents drift, ice sheets advance and retreat, and climate shift across deep time.
I'm a data scientist who started this in June 2025. It took about ten months of texture rendering, climate-curve fitting from peer-reviewed sources, and a lot of late nights to get every period scientifically grounded. It's free, has no ads, and runs out of my home lab.
Built on data from
How to use WhenEarth
Time slider
Drag the slider at the bottom of the globe to scrub through time — from the present day all the way back 750 million years to Snowball Earth. Each stop corresponds to a scientifically modelled continental configuration, climate state, and sea level.
Compare mode
Click the Compare button in the bottom-right corner to open a picture-in-picture globe. Choose any second time period to compare continental positions side-by-side.
Location pins
Use the location search in the top-right to drop a pin on any modern city or landmark. The pin will appear on the globe so you can see where that location was hundreds of millions of years ago relative to today's position.
Climate panel
The left sidebar (desktop) shows temperature, CO₂, oxygen levels, sea level change, and day length for the selected period — all sourced from peer-reviewed palaeoclimate reconstructions.
Keyboard shortcuts
Keyboard shortcuts are inactive when a text input is focused.
The geological eras
Cenozoic — 66 Ma to present
The "Age of Mammals." After the K-Pg extinction wiped out non-avian dinosaurs, mammals diversified explosively. Grasslands spread, Antarctica froze, and the Himalaya rose. The last few million years saw repeated glacial cycles and the emergence of Homo sapiens.
Mesozoic — 252–66 Ma
The "Age of Reptiles." Dinosaurs ruled, Pangaea broke apart forming the Atlantic, CO₂ was 4–8× modern levels, and temperatures were 6–10°C warmer. Flowering plants appeared in the Cretaceous. Ended with a 10-km asteroid impact at Chicxulub.
Paleozoic — 541–252 Ma
Life exploded out of the oceans. The Cambrian saw the appearance of nearly all major animal body plans. Fish, amphibians, reptiles, and insects colonised the land. The era ended with the Permian extinction — the worst in Earth's history, killing ~90% of marine species.
Neoproterozoic — 1,000–541 Ma
Earth experienced "Snowball Earth" glaciations (~720 and ~640 Ma) when ice may have extended to the equator. Multicellular life first appeared. The Ediacaran biota — soft-bodied, frond-like organisms — are the first undisputed complex animals.
Data sources
Every climate curve and continental reconstruction in WhenEarth is derived from peer-reviewed literature. The main sources are:
! A note on accuracy
WhenEarth is an educational visualisation, not a research tool. The palaeographic reconstructions become progressively less certain the further back in time you go. Continental outlines older than ~300 Ma carry significant uncertainty, and climate variables (temperature, CO₂, sea level) for deep time are interpolated from sparse proxy data.
Textures for ancient periods are artist-informed approximations — accurate in broad strokes (ice extent, ocean coverage, vegetation zones) but not in fine topographic detail. If you spot a factual error, please use the correction link below.
Contact & suggestions
Got an idea, a correction, or just want to say hi? Pick a topic — it goes straight to my inbox.
Or email [email protected] directly.
Support the project
If WhenEarth taught you something, made you curious, or you just enjoyed scrubbing through the Cretaceous for fun, a coffee helps cover hosting and keeps me building. Next on the roadmap: mass-extinction overlays, sharper CO₂/temperature visualizations, and more paleogeographic detail.
Buy me a coffee