Scrub a timeline and watch the planet rebuild itself. That’s the whole idea: a 3D Earth you can drag backwards through geological time, with the continents drifting apart and the entire look of the world, oceans, land, atmosphere, ice, changing to match the era you’re standing in.

It’s a Wildlab experiment, built with React Three Fiber and three.js. Not a product; a place to keep our creative-technology muscles warm. It uses the same WebGL and shader techniques that drive the morphing animals on our own site.

Three ways to draw a planet

The sphere is drawn by a custom GLSL shader that runs in one of three modes depending on how far back you are. The oldest eras have no real paleogeography data, so they’re generated procedurally: a molten mode for the Hadean, a glowing, barely-solid surface, and a noise mode for the Archean, where simplex noise stands in for land that no map remembers.…