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The ground under you is 4.54 billion years old. Read it a layer at a time.

Fall to the centre of the Earth at true scale. Walk back through time to before there was air you could breathe. Touch the rock below to see when each layer was laid down.

Colours: the official chart of geological time, softenedA drawing, not a real place. Layer thickness is not to scale.
The layers, as a list
  1. Quaternary 2.58 to 0 million years ago
  2. Neogene 23.04 to 2.58 million years ago
  3. Paleogene 66 to 23.04 million years ago
  4. Cretaceous 143.1 to 66 million years ago
  5. Jurassic 201.4 to 143.1 million years ago
  6. Triassic 251.902 to 201.4 million years ago
  7. Permian 298.9 to 251.902 million years ago
  8. Carboniferous 358.86 to 298.9 million years ago
  9. Devonian 419.62 to 358.86 million years ago
  10. Silurian 443.1 to 419.62 million years ago
  11. Ordovician 486.85 to 443.1 million years ago
  12. Cambrian 538.8 to 486.85 million years ago
  13. Precambrian 4,540 to 538.8 million years ago
252 million years ago

The Earth, as it was

Nearly all the land was one supercontinent, Pangaea. Spin the globe through a thousand million years of moving continents, and see where the fossils on this site were found when their animals were alive.

Spin the globe
6,371 km

Surface to Core

Scroll from your feet to the centre of the planet at a fixed, true scale. The deepest hole people have ever dug is gone before the first screen ends.

Start falling
crust: a hairline at this scale0 km2,891 core5,1506,371 centre
4,540,000,000 years

The Walk

One metre for every million years, 4.54 km in all. Dinosaurs turn up in the last 230 metres. Our species, in the last 30 centimetres.

Start walking
4,540 million years agotodayanimals spread, 539 million years ago
12.3 kmThe deepest hole ever drilled, on the Kola Peninsula in Arctic Russia
6,371 kmAverage distance from the surface to the centre
2.5 cmHow much wider the Atlantic gets each year
66 millionYears since the asteroid that ended the dinosaurs

From the rocks

Two cores through the atlas

Everything on the site sits in one of two columns: down through the planet, or back through time. Each band is a collection, as thick as the number of pieces planned for it. The numbers say how many are written so far, out of how many planned.

Open the atlas

Space

  1. Space environment0 of 12
  2. Atmosphere1 of 12
  3. Oceans and water2 of 12
  4. Ecology0 of 12
  5. Human impact0 of 10
  6. Landforms1 of 10
  7. Natural hazards3 of 10
  8. Rocks and minerals1 of 10
  9. Plate tectonics4 of 10
  10. Interior3 of 11

The centre

Down through the planet

Now

  1. Climate history1 of 8
  2. Fossils and extinction2 of 12
  3. Prehistoric life5 of 10
  4. Evolution of life7 of 12
  5. Geological time3 of 9
  6. Origins1 of 9

4,567 million years ago

Back through time