4,567,000,000 years, from a collapsing cloud of gas and dust to this morning. Every date, every colour of the sky, taken from the scientific literature.
Scroll to begin
4,567million years ago
Pre-solar nebula
O2–
CO2–
Surface–
Day–
Moon–
Sun–
Accuracy & sources
This page is a visualisation, not a simulation. Here is exactly which parts are measured science and which parts are illustration, so you can trust the first and discount the second.
What is accurate
Dates. Every formal eon, era and period boundary follows the International Commission on Stratigraphy International Chronostratigraphic Chart. Event ages come from the primary literature and are listed with each moment; where a date is genuinely disputed, the card says so rather than picking a side silently.
The colour bands in the scrubber and the era label are the official ICS/CGMW colours for each interval.
Atmospheric chemistry. Oxygen and carbon dioxide readouts follow published proxy reconstructions. These have wide error bars, especially before the Phanerozoic, and the readout is a central estimate, not a measurement.
Sky and ocean colour. Driven by the atmospheric chemistry of the moment: the Archean organic haze, iron-rich anoxic oceans, and the shift to a Rayleigh-blue sky only after free oxygen accumulates.
Day length is interpolated between published tidal-rhythmite and cyclostratigraphic determinations: 16.9 h at 2.46 Ga (Lantink et al. 2022), 18.68 h at 1.4 Ga (Meyers & Malinverno 2018), 21.9 h at 620 Ma (Williams 2000), 23.5 h at 70 Ma (de Winter et al. 2020). It is not extrapolated from today's tidal rate, which would give a badly wrong answer in the Precambrian.
Earth–Moon distance is derived, not tabulated. The system conserves total angular momentum to first order, so a measured day length fixes the lunar orbit: solve L = Cω + m√(GMa) for a. This reproduces the independently published distances (341,000 km at 1.4 Ga, 370,000 km at 620 Ma) to within about one percent, and it puts the Moon at roughly three Earth radii just after the giant impact, which is where impact simulations put it. The Hadean values are still the least certain numbers on this page.
Ice is tracked per hemisphere. From 33.9 to about 2.7 million years ago only Antarctica was glaciated, so drawing a symmetric pair of polar caps would be wrong for a third of the Cenozoic. Here the north stays ice-free until the Quaternary.
Solar luminosity uses the standard solar model relation, L(t)/L0 = [1 + 0.4(1 − t/t0)]−1 (Gough 1981), which is why the young Sun is about 70% as bright.
Continental area through time tracks published crustal growth curves, so the fraction of the globe that is land is roughly right even when the shapes are not.
The present-day Earth is NASA's Blue Marble and Earth at Night imagery: real satellite data, public domain.
What is illustration
The shapes of ancient continents are schematic. They are generated procedurally, constrained to the correct total land area and the correct degree of assembly (dispersed versus gathered into a supercontinent) for each moment. They are not palaeogeographic reconstructions, and you should not read coastlines off them. Only the last few million years use real geography.
Cloud patterns, individual craters and the exact placement of ice are illustrative. Ice extent tracks the correct global state, glaciated or not, and the correct hemispheres, but not specific ice-sheet margins.
The Moon is drawn at its true size relative to Earth, always: 0.2727 of Earth's radius. Its distance is to scale just after the giant impact, when it really did sit about three Earth radii away, and is then progressively compressed toward the present, because the modern Moon at sixty Earth radii would be far off screen. So the drama of the early Moon is real; the closeness of the modern one is not.
The Sun is drawn far larger than reality so it is visible at all. Its brightness relative to today is correct.
Time is not linear with scroll. If it were, 88% of this page would be Precambrian and the entire history of animals would be the last few seconds of scrolling. Each moment gets comparable space instead. The scrubber on the right is linear in time, which is why the whole Phanerozoic is that thin stack of colours at the bottom and everything above it is microbes. The date readout is always the real date.
Known simplifications
Life is described, not modelled. No organisms are rendered on the globe: at this scale none would be visible anyway, which is itself a fact worth sitting with.
The transition between two moments interpolates smoothly. Real transitions were sometimes abrupt (the Chicxulub impact) and sometimes took tens of millions of years (the greening of the continents). The card text tells you which.
Pre-Earth phases, the nebula and the protoplanetary disk, are stylised. Particle counts, sizes and orbital speeds are chosen for legibility.
Corrections
If you find something wrong, it is worth fixing. The whole point of this page is that the numbers hold up.
Imagery: NASA Earth Observatory (Blue Marble Next Generation, Earth at Night), public domain. Rendering: three.js. Chronostratigraphy: ICS. Built as a public-domain science explainer.