Visualizing 100k Years of Earth in WebGL

Northern winter and summer look very different[1] (and those don't even capture sea ice).

I've puzzled over how to represent such variation. Especially with deeper time paleogeography, where those 100 kyr of ice ages and sea level changes can be the variation which needs to be aggregated.

One approach is sampling biased by similarity. So you snag points in time, from similar times of year and climate states. If the interactive allows twiddling those, it might not be too misleading.

One approach is open-shutter motion blur. The sometimes-there sometimes-not semi-transparent ice sheets.

One approach is, maybe call it flickered multiples. If one was showing a year, the visual could rapidly cycle through the months.

Any others?

Clouds raise similar issues. It's interesting how time-blurred cloud cover changes with seasons and decades and climate.

[1] Jan 2004: https://eoimages.gsfc.nasa.gov/images/imagerecords/74000/742... (2 MB) June: https://eoimages.gsfc.nasa.gov/images/imagerecords/74000/743... from Blue Marble Next Generation https://visibleearth.nasa.gov/collection/1484/blue-marble Much higher resolutions are available there.

Nice work! This is like a much better version of Ancient Earth[0], which I made ~10 years ago using GPlates[1]. I like your approach of rendering the map itself from data, which makes it continuous, rather than just wrapping map textures around a globe.

[0] https://dinosaurpictures.org/ancient-earth#240

[1] https://www.gplates.org/

Very cool, the interactivity of this makes this a much better learning tool than a set of static images (for me, at least).

One minor suggestion: on mobile put the date scrubber on the bottom, otherwise my thumb gets in the way of the UI while sliding back and forth through time :)

Also, I’m not sure if a log scale for time makes sense in this case. It confused me for a second, at least.

Great job, thanks for sharing!

Awesome. I'd suggest implementing lakes that were created by ice sheets blocking rivers in the northern hemisphere (in Canada & Siberia).

This is great. Always wanted something exactly like this for teaching or learning History and Geology. For some reason I had a real struggle with history in books format.

doesn't seem to work on macOS with either Safari or Chrome. am i missing something?

Interesting, but you're missing geologically important proglacial lakes, like Lake Missoula and Lake Agassiz.

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