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 the Paleozoic (540 Ma) to today. Scrub through deep time and watch continents drift, climate shift, and life appear.
Unlike continental-drift viewers that only animate landmasses, Play Deep Time Earth overlays real paleoclimate from CESM general-circulation simulations — temperature, precipitation, and prevailing winds — together with reconstructed ocean currents, plate boundaries, and hundreds of thousands of fossil occurrences from the Paleobiology Database.
Continents move continuously across 540 million years through signed-distance-field texture interpolation rather than discrete jumps, so you can scrub any moment from the Cambrian to today and see climate, life, and geography change together — an interactive paleomap and Pangaea simulation in one.
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).
