- Author
- Bouke Stam, TechniStuff
- Published
- 19 May 2025
- Kind
- Personal blog post, with a live demo
- Original
- technistuff.com/posts/visualizing-100000-years-of-earth-in-webgl/
- Subject
- Images made by rules
- Themes
- Art through code
What it is
Bouke Stam describes building an interactive model of Earth over the last 100,000 years. It combines elevation, sea level, climate, ice sheets and modern borders. It runs in the browser using THREE.js and custom shaders.
What it says
- Each height is one byte: 25 values underwater, 25 on land, 206 near sea level.
- That split keeps the shoreline precise while the rest of the range stays coarse.
- The shader compares height against the chosen sea level, so moving it redraws coasts.
- Climate lives in a texture array, one layer per year, averaged between layers.
- Colour follows rules on temperature and rainfall, with smooth transitions between biomes.
- Ice sheets become triangles through flood fill, smoothing and Delaunay triangulation.
What evidence it gives
The post is a build log with working code and a public demo. It names its datasets, including NOAA's ETOPO relief model. It does not evaluate the visual accuracy of the result.
Interests and limits
Colour rules are tuned by eye, which the author says worked surprisingly well. The author lists more accurate data and better rendering as next steps.
Connections
These links are this wiki's own reading, not claims the sources make.
- Layers of Memory, Layers of Compression. Kellogg treats memory as a budget, where detail is spent on what matters most. Stam does that literally, giving 206 of 256 height values to the coastline's range. So what is a memory file's shoreline?