Earth and Environment Atlas

How The Planet Works
Atlas

Atlas Trails

A trail is a short, ordered route through the atlas. Each stop says why it comes next, so a journey reads as an argument rather than a list. Start one, leave, and come back: your place is kept in this browser, and you do not need an account for that.

Four Billion Years in Eight Stops

From a molten, airless Hadean Earth to the ice age climate cycle we are still living inside of: the founding wave's own path through deep time, deep rock and the earthquake that changed how the planet is measured.

8 stops

Reading the Rock Record

How geologists learned to read time in stone: six stops from a Danish anatomist's simple rule about flat-lying sediment to the calibrated calendar of the geologic time scale. This is the trust-and-methodology story of...

6 stops

The Full Sweep of Geologic Time

A walk through the whole geologic time scale, eon by period by epoch, from Earth's molten beginning to the epoch we live in now.

9 stops

Trails are curated by the atlas. Where you have got to in one is remembered by your own browser and is never sent to us.