Want to See the Earth?

A 3D globe drawn from real observation data. Day and night right now, yesterday's clouds, where the Moon is and what shape it is, the earthquakes of the past week — all on one globe you can spin. No ads · No purchases · No login. ■ Rewind the continents a billion years Watch India race north and crash into Asia. See South America and Africa fit together like puzzle pieces. Watch Australia break away from Antarctica as Antarctica begins to freeze. ■ Slide borders back 5,000 years Drag the slider from 3000 BCE to 1991, across 27 eras. Tap a country to read its story from that time. World borders are simplified maps based on open academic sources. ■ Tap and find out Rivers, mountain ranges, seas, the shapes of the seafloor, landmarks, tectonic plates, and glowing discovery spots — notes are tucked away in more than 290 places around the world. Tap the Alps to read about the Alps. Tap the Mariana Trench to find out how deep it goes. They are written as if you were standing right there — not like a textbook. ■ Knock on the planet Turn on "Knock on the Earth" and tap the globe: seismic waves spread out from that spot. Only after you see that S waves never reach the other side do the mantle and the core show their colors and names — the same way people actually worked out what is inside the Earth. ■ Also inside · Weather around the world right now — temperature and sky for 36 cities at once · Ocean currents — the paths of the sea, averaged from drifting buoys · Earthquakes from the past week · Tectonic plates and their boundaries (tap one to read its story) · Constellations, how far away the stars are, and the phases of the Moon · Routes through history — the sea voyages of Magellan, Zheng He and Columbus, and the land journeys of the Silk Road, Alexander and Ibn Battuta: six in all · Where minerals are found — gold, oil, diamonds, uranium, iron ■ Our promise We don't put ads in it. There are no purchases. No account, no login — we cannot tell who is using it. The app does connect to the internet to fetch maps and observation data — see "Data safety" on this page for the details. For kids who are just starting to read, and for grown-ups too. Even without reading, you can play just by spinning and tapping. Weather, earthquakes and clouds are fetched from the internet as you go. The globe images and the current and wind maps are built into the app — the globe still spins without the internet. It renders in 3D, so it may run slowly on very old devices. Once you have seen what the Earth really looks like, the news and history start to sound a little different. — bluedot42