Earth Thru Time v0.26.1

About the project

EarthThruTime3D is a research project for exploring the past Earth in three dimensions from palaeogeographic data through geological time. The first goal is the surface; crustal deformation and mantle convection come later.

Made by

PaleoBytes · an Earth-science research tool

Contributors

Contributions are listed on GitHub and in the work log (devlog).

Version

v0.26.1 · updated 2026-10-03

Contact

How to report a problem · Privacy · GitHub

Data sources

Laske, G., Masters, G., & Reif, C. (2000). CRUST 2.0: A new global crustal model at 2×2 degrees. IGPP, UC San Diego. EarthByte GPlates 2.3 · CC BY 4.0. Present-day thickness, resampled for display.

Scotese, C. R., 2016. PALEOMAP PaleoAtlas for GPlates and the PaleoData Plotter Program. PALEOMAP Project (www.scotese.com). doi:10.5281/zenodo.10251792

The land masks shown by default were segmented from the 90 maps of this PaleoAtlas. The Zenodo record lists CC BY 4.0, but who attached that licence has not been confirmed, so the original map images are not distributed.

Plate tectonic maps by C. R. Scotese, PALEOMAP Project (www.scotese.com)

The earlier masks, kept for comparison, were segmented from the 17 web maps of 2002; the original map files are not distributed. The originals can be seen on the PALEOMAP site, and their use follows the PALEOMAP terms.

Scotese, C. R. & Wright, N. M. (2018). PALEOMAP Paleodigital Elevation Models (PaleoDEMs) for the Phanerozoic. Zenodo, CC BY 4.0.

The elevation series colours these 109 six-minute (0.1°) elevation and bathymetry grids. The coastline is the grid's 0 m contour; floating ice shelves read as ocean because the grids hold the sea floor beneath them, while grounded ice shows its surface height. Before 540 Ma the timeline continues with the PaleoAtlas (2016) masks.

Scotese, C. R. (2021). Global Mean Surface Temperatures for 100 Phanerozoic Time Intervals. Zenodo, CC BY 4.0. Scotese, Song, Mills & van der Meer (2021), Phanerozoic paleotemperatures, Earth-Science Reviews 215, 103503; Valdes, Scotese & Lunt (2021), Deep ocean temperatures through time, Climate of the Past 17, 1483.

The elevation series' temperature view and the strip above the slider come from these 100 one-degree surface air temperature maps: climate-model output nudged to oxygen isotopes and climate-indicating rocks (evaporites, coals, glacial deposits), a compromise between model and proxies rather than an observation. The global mean is the area-weighted mean of each map, computed by this project. There is no data before 540 Ma. Blue spans on the strip are icehouses: the Late Ordovician (~445 Ma), the Late Palaeozoic Ice Age (~360–260 Ma) and the late Cenozoic (from ~34 Ma).

Krapp, M., Beyer, R. M., Edmundson, S. L., Valdes, P. J. & Manica, A. (2021). A statistics-based reconstruction of high-resolution global terrestrial climate for the last 800,000 years. Scientific Data 8, 228; OSF, CC BY 4.0.

The ‘modelled vegetation’ and ‘modelled rainfall’ views of the 25,000 and 130,000 year windows come from this 0.5° set: output of the HadCM3 climate model joined by statistics into one value per thousand years, a model and not a reconstruction. Vegetation is the set's BIOME4 biomes folded into an order of increasing plant cover. It does not reproduce the ‘Green Sahara’ of the African Humid Period: over 18–30°N, 10°W–32°E annual rainfall is 25 mm today, only 54 mm 11,000 years ago, and never passes 83 mm in 800,000 years.

Each PaleoDEM grid already carries the sea level of its time. The coastline shown is the grid's 0 m contour, and the Cretaceous interior seaways or the drowned Palaeozoic cratons are part of the reconstruction itself. What the grids lack is variation within a 5 Myr gap and the short glacial cycles.

So two published curves are shown alongside. van der Meer, D. G. et al. (2022). Long-term Phanerozoic global mean sea level. Gondwana Research 111, 103–121, CC BY 4.0: a long-term curve from strontium isotopes and ice estimates, 1 Myr resolution, about 0 to +217 m relative to present. Spratt, R. M. & Lisiecki, L. E. (2016). A Late Pleistocene sea level stack. Climate of the Past 12, 1079–1092, data at NOAA, CC BY 3.0: the glacial cycles of the last 800,000 years, minima about −130 m. Both are reconstructions, not measurements. The Haq family of short-term curves is not used, for copyright reasons.

The sea-level slider in the inspector is a what-if. It shifts the grid's heights by the slider's value and recuts the coastline; ticking 'Apply curve departure' adds only how far the long-term curve departs from the two bracketing grids' datum. The grids already carry the sea level of their time, so the curve's value is never added outright.

Today's glaciers, ice sheets and Antarctic ice shelves are Natural Earth 10 m data (public domain) placed on the grid. Past ice is this project's segmentation of the ice the PaleoAtlas (2016) maps paint white; each grid borrows the nearest map within 5 Myr. White on those maps is also the colour of the highest ground, so plateaus inside 45° of latitude are left out, and sea ice the maps paint appears too. There is no data before 540 Ma. The West Antarctic ice sheet rests on bedrock below sea level, so ice is drawn over places the grid shows as ocean.

The river overlay is potential drainage this project computed by routing water over each grid: pits filled to the level at which they spill, each cell's water sent to the steepest neighbour, the area upstream summed, rain taken as even and evaporation as nil. It is not a published reconstruction, and since the grids are smooth and close any gorge narrower than a cell, every basin spills over.

Kocsis, A. T. & Scotese, C. R. (2021). Mapping paleocoastlines and continental flooding during the Phanerozoic. Earth-Science Reviews 213, 103463. doi:10.5281/zenodo.4297693, CC BY 4.0.

The 'fossil-checked coastlines' overlay is this PaleoCoastlines dataset: PALEOMAP coastlines moved to the maximum transgression that marine fossils in the Paleobiology Database indicate. It has 81 stops from 0 to 535 Ma, and the one nearest the age on screen is drawn.

Views between two stops are interpolated: continents move with the PALEOMAP rotation of the plate beneath them while their shapes blend between the two stops, so they are neither an observation nor a published reconstruction.

The present-day Earth

NASA Earth Observatory, Blue Marble (shaded relief and bathymetry), served by NASA EOSDIS GIBS. NASA imagery, no copyright.

NOAA/NCEP Global Forecast System (GFS) 0.25° analysis; NOAA/NESDIS Global Mosaic of Geostationary Satellite Imagery (GMGSI), longwave infrared. US government works, public domain.

Menemenlis, D. et al. (2008). ECCO2: High resolution global ocean and sea ice data synthesis. Mercator Ocean Quarterly Newsletter 31, 13–21. ECCO2 cube92 (NASA JPL/MIT), from the NASA NAS data portal.

The satellite base at the present (0 Ma) is a cloud-free composite of about 2004. Wind and clouds are not live: they are a GFS analysis fetched once a day and the satellite infrared mosaic of the same hour. The currents are the 1992–2018 mean of the ECCO2 ocean model's surface (5 m) velocity: a model, not an observation, and averaging removes the eddies. These are open data of the US government and NASA, and the textures this project makes from them follow the same terms.

Plate reconstruction data

Turning on plate reconstruction on the globe reconstructs the continents at the same time from a rotation model and draws them over the map. Its source and method differ from the map segmentation above, so where the two lines disagree, the two models disagree.

Cao, X., Collins, A. S., Pisarevsky, S., Flament, N., Li, S., Hasterok, D., and Müller, R. D., 2024. Earth's tectonic and plate boundary evolution over 1.8 billion years. Geoscience Frontiers, 15(2), 101922.
Reference frame: palaeomagnetic, extended to 1.8 Ga · Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International

Matthews, K. J., Maloney, K. T., Zahirovic, S., Williams, S. E., Seton, M., and Müller, R. D., 2016. Global plate boundary evolution and kinematics since the late Paleozoic. Global and Planetary Change, 146, 226-250.
Reference frame: hybrid mantle (GK07) · Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International

Merdith, A. S., Williams, S. E., Collins, A. S., Tetley, M. G., Mulder, J. A., Blades, M. L., Young, A., Armistead, S. E., Cannon, J., Zahirovic, S., and Müller, R. D., 2021. Extending full-plate tectonic models into deep time: Linking the Neoproterozoic and the Phanerozoic. Earth-Science Reviews, 214, 103477.
Reference frame: palaeomagnetic · Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported

Müller, R. D., Flament, N., Cannon, J., Tetley, M. G., Williams, S. E., Cao, X., Bodur, Ö. F., Zahirovic, S., and Merdith, A., 2022. A tectonic-rules-based mantle reference frame since 1 billion years ago – implications for supercontinent cycles and plate–mantle system evolution. Solid Earth, 13, 1127–1159.
Reference frame: optimised mantle · Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International

Scotese, C. R., 2016. PALEOMAP PaleoAtlas for GPlates and the PaleoData Plotter Program. PALEOMAP Project. doi:10.5281/zenodo.10251792
Reference frame: PALEOMAP (plate 001 'Hot Spot to PMAG' is the identity) · Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International

The models share nearly the same relative motions and differ in their absolute reference frames. The authors recommend the palaeomagnetic frame for climate-related work, and state that none of the models suits Pacific hotspot kinematics or analyses shorter than 5 million years.

Licence

The code is under the MIT licence. The data this project derives from CC BY sources (the elevation, temperature and ice textures, the sea-level curves, the motion fields, the coastline and plate data) is CC BY 4.0; the PaleoAtlas (2016) and 2002 masks, whose source terms are not settled, follow their sources' terms. LICENSE-DATA.md draws the line. The 3D rendering uses Three.js under the MIT licence.

Privacy

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