Deep time · interactive

Deep time, to scale

Earth's whole history — 4.567 billion years — on one ruler you can zoom. Drag to pan, scroll or pinch to zoom, or jump to a chapter. Watch the red sliver at the present: all of written human history. At full view it is one nine-hundredth of a pixel; you must magnify the present nearly 900× before it is even one pixel wide, and ~86,000× before you can read it.

Bands: ICS chart via Macrostrat (CC-BY 4.0) · event ages hand-curated & separately sourced · the record, with sources & the contested ages flagged →

How to read it. The present sits at the right edge; the deep past runs left. At full zoom the coloured chapters of life — every period you learned in school — are crushed into the last few percent on the right, and humans are not visible at all. That invisibility is the point: it is not a rendering limit, it is the ratio. The geological bands are the official ICS chronostratigraphic chart (boundary ages in millions of years); the event flags are hand-placed and separately cited, with every contested age called out in the archive entry.