Play Deep Time Earth — explore 540 million years of Earth in 3D
Play Deep Time Earth is an interactive 3D sandbox for exploring our planet from 540 Ma (late Ediacaran) to today. Scrub through deep time and watch continents drift, climate shift, and life appear.
Play Deep Time Earth combines CESM climate simulations — annual temperature, precipitation and winds — with schematic currents derived from wind and sea temperature, plate boundaries and fossil occurrences sampled from the Paleobiology Database.
Explore any age from the late Ediacaran to today. Terrain is linearly blended between reconstructed height maps 5 million years apart; intermediate coastlines are approximations. The 0 Ma climate is a pre-industrial model reference.
What you can explore
- Plate tectonics and continental drift reconstructed from PyGPlates rotation models (PALEOMAP, SETON2012, Müller 2022).
- Paleoclimate layers — temperature, precipitation, and winds from CESM GCM simulations.
- Fossil distributions sampled from the Paleobiology Database (PBDB).
- Ocean currents, wind fields, plate boundaries, and global indicators (CO₂, O₂, sea level).
