What you are looking at
The whole Earth, the sea floor included, built from NOAA's ETOPO 2022 measurements of the height of the land and the depth of the sea. On the flat map heights are exaggerated 80 times and on the globe 20 times, because at true scale the Himalaya would be a wrinkle you could not see. Slide the control towards North to look up across the northern hemisphere; drag to move, scroll or pinch to zoom, and point at or tap a country for its name.
The layers
- Night sky: on the globe, the real sky for this moment behind the Earth: about 5,000 stars, the best-known constellations, and the planets, Sun and Moon where they are now. Turn the globe and the sky turns with it. During a meteor shower a ring marks its radiant, the point in the sky its streaks seem to fly out from, with the date of its peak.
- Landmarks: the highest, deepest and strangest places, with their measured figures, from Everest to Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench and the deepest hole ever drilled.
- Tectonic plates: all 52 plates of Peter Bird's PB2002 model, each edge coloured by what it is doing: pulling apart, one plate diving under another, sliding past, or colliding. Point at an edge for how fast the two plates move, in millimetres a year, about as fast as fingernails grow.
- Inside the Earth: on the globe, an eighth of the planet cut away to show the crust, mantle, liquid outer core and solid inner core at their true proportions.
- Ozone layer: all the ozone in the air overhead, as NASA's OMPS instrument measured it on the newest well-covered day. Each southern spring the ozone hole opens over Antarctica.
- Day and night: the half of the planet in sunlight right now, by the clock in Greenwich (GMT), with the night side darkened, twilight in between, and the lights of the world's cities and towns switched on where it is dark. It moves on as the minutes pass.
- Fireballs: rocks from space big enough to explode high in the air, as US government sensors saw them since 1988: where each was brightest, how high, how fast, and how much energy it released, in kilotons of TNT. The biggest, over Chelyabinsk in Russia in February 2013, injured about 1,500 people, mostly with broken glass.
- Aurora now: NOAA's forecast of the chance of seeing an aurora overhead, refreshed every five minutes.
- Close approaches: on the globe, the twenty asteroids (and the odd comet) passing nearest the Earth, within 7.5 million km, from a few days ago to a month ahead, placed in the night sky where they are now, as seen from the centre of the Earth. Point at one for how far away it is, how big, and when it passes closest. Many are rocks the size of a house, some found only days before they pass.
- Atmosphere and satellites: shown on the globe at true scale, mountains included. At full view the air we breathe is thinner than a pixel, which is the point; the ruler magnifies the bottom 120 km so the layers can be read. Satellites are placed from their published orbits, in your browser, twice a second.
Each layer's key opens when you turn it on; the small arrow beside any other ticked layer opens its key. A shareable link: the address in your browser keeps the view and the layers you choose.
Sources
Relief: NOAA ETOPO 2022 (public domain). Borders: Natural Earth (public domain), drawn from the UK's point of view. Ozone: NASA OMPS on Suomi NPP; we acknowledge the use of imagery provided by services from NASA's Global Imagery Browse Services (GIBS), part of NASA's Earth Science Data and Information System (ESDIS). Aurora: NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center, OVATION model (public domain). Orbits: CelesTrak. Stars: the Yale Bright Star Catalogue, 5th revised edition (Hoffleit and Warren), via NASA's High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive Research Center (HEASARC); constellation figures drawn by StreetOwl. City lights: NASA Earth Observatory and NOAA NGDC, from the Suomi NPP satellite's VIIRS instrument (2012), via NASA GIBS. Planets: NASA JPL's approximate positions of the planets (Standish); Moon: the Astronomical Almanac's low-precision formula. Atmosphere heights are the usual round figures; the boundaries move with latitude, season and the Sun. Tectonic plates: P. Bird (2003), An updated digital model of plate boundaries, Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems 4(3), 1027 (PB2002); GIS data by Hugo Ahlenius (Open Data Commons Attribution Licence). Inside the Earth: the Preliminary Reference Earth Model (Dziewonski and Anderson, 1981). Fireballs: NASA JPL's Center for Near Earth Object Studies (CNEOS), from US government sensors. Meteor showers: the International Meteor Organization's working list of visual meteor showers. Close approaches: NASA JPL's Center for Near Earth Object Studies (close-approach data) and JPL Horizons (positions). Landmark figures are the published measurements, each named on its card. Not for navigation.