I built this interactive timeline for two reasons:
- To get a sense of our place on Earth.
On the geological scale, humans arrived so recently that our presence is barely visible. And yet so much has happened over the last millennium, the last century... even within my own lifetime! I tried to reconcile these two scales with an exponential zoom that lets you move from one to the other with a swipe of the finger. The result floored me. - To answer the people who say "the climate has always changed, this is nothing new!"
That was my original goal. To get a clearer picture of why we're in this mess by looking at how atmospheric CO2 has evolved. And unfortunately, it's very, very clear.
Click the little square in the top right to go fullscreen, then drag the slider to zoom out through time ⬇️
Interactive timeline: geological time scale and CO₂ concentration.
On the geological scale, did you notice:
- Before us (the Cenozoic), and before the dinosaurs (the Mesozoic), came an even longer period (the Paleozoic) when life suddenly exploded (the "Cambrian explosion"), then 90% of species vanished.
- The first eon, the Hadean, when the planet was molten, looks short. But it lasts as long as the Phanerozoic – the era of "visible life".
- It's called that because fossils finally become visible in it; at first, geologists thought it marked the beginning of life itself. Then we realized the first life forms were much, much older.
On CO2, you can see:
- The famous "hockey stick" graph: CO2 spiking in the industrial era, whether you go back 1,000 years or 10,000. That's what has everyone worried.
- You have to go back around 10 million years to find a comparable CO2 level (where the red dotted line, marking today's level, crosses the graph).
Unlike my previous experiment, which I hand-coded, this exploration was vibe-coded with Claude Code: the code was generated step by step, across a dozen or so versions that are public and visible on github.com.
The data comes from the International Chronostratigraphic Chart (ICS, v2024/12) via the Macrostrat API.