![[OC] Earth's 4.5 billion year history mapped onto a clock — every second is 105,000 years](https://preview.redd.it/ejea0r1y35zg1.gif?s=578b8dba84f57c912c50e42039bdabd4692cdab9)
[OC] Earth's 4.5 billion year history mapped onto a clock — every second is 105,000 years
The clock runs on your local time, so whatever time you're reading this, you're looking at a specific moment in Earth's history. At 10:34 you're watching the Cambrian explosion. At 11:39 the dinosaurs go extinct. You can also drag the scrubber handle to move through 4.5 billion years manually.
Key events are marked along the periphery. The globe renders 14 geological phases, from the Molten Hadean through Snowball Earth events to the present, using paleogeographic continent data from Scotese Paleomap. From around 10:20 onwards you can watch the continents drift in real time.
I find deep time useful for perspective: humanity has existed for about 300,000 years (about 3 seconds before midnight on this clock). Geological insignificance is oddly grounding.
I've been itching to build something like this for awhile now. Two weeks of evenings later, here it is! Happy to answer questions about how it was built in the comments.
[Edit: corrected the Cambrian explosion to 10:34 and humanity’s time on the clock to ~3 seconds, not 3:00 and 0.3 seconds as originally stated.]