EarthPulse — Weekend Challenge: Earth Day Edition

Aayush Sapkota — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 04:50:20 +0000

Somewhere on this planet, a forest that stood for a thousand years is gone. A sea that fed millions is dead. A city is breathing air that no government dashboard will tell you about.

This is a submission for Weekend Challenge: Earth Day Edition

What I Built

Most of us only meet these places as a headline, a chart, or a number that scrolls away. I wanted one small surface where the harm stays visible — where you have to look at the same patch of Earth twice, years apart, and sit with what changed. EarthPulse is that bet: orbit first, guilt second, denial harder.

EarthPulse is a website built around a globe you can spin. Markers sit on real parts of the world where something has already gone wrong—often tied to climate, lost forest, industry and waste, conflict, or pollution. When you open one of those places, the view moves in close and you see two moments in time from above so you can compare what used to be there with what is there now, together with short facts, something readable to sit with, links if you want to go deeper, and a few practical lines about what could still matter on the ground. You can also search for a city and get a compact local readout—things like air and how much green is left—and small steps that feel possible where you live. Under the hood, Google Gemini carries the longer writing and read-further side for those location pages, while backboard.io backs the research route with threaded memory so a later request can continue the same conversation instead of starting from zero every time.

Demo

Live: https://earthpulse-three.vercel.app/

Try: open the site → spin the globe → click a red dot → drag before / after → scroll the page → search a city and open the readout.

Code

sapkota-aayush / earthpulse

EarthPulse

Somewhere on this planet, a forest that stood for a thousand years is gone. A sea that fed millions is dead. A city is breathing air that no government dashboard will tell you about.

The story

Most of us only meet these places as a headline, a chart, or a number that scrolls away. I wanted one small surface where the harm stays visible — where you have to look at the same patch of Earth twice, years apart, and sit with what changed. EarthPulse is that bet: orbit first, guilt second, denial harder.

What I built

EarthPulse is a Next.js app with a 3D globe (globe.gl + Three.js). Red pins mark real stressed sites (climate, deforestation, industry, war, pollution, and similar). Tap a pin → the camera dives to a detail page with a before/after satellite-style slider, facts, a written narrative and read-further links, plus a…

View on GitHub

How I Built It

Front end: Next.js, TypeScript, Tailwind, and Framer Motion. The globe uses globe.gl and Three.js for movement, markers, and camera fly-ins. The surface uses map tiles plus a fallback image so the globe still looks right if tiles load slowly or fail.
Location detail: Choosing a marked place opens a focused view with a before-and-after view from two years, facts, a story powered by Google Gemini, read-further material (Gemini where the API supports it), and a short “what still moves here” section tied to the same coordinates.

Search: Geocoding plus open data drive local signals (for example air quality and green cover); server routes return the stress readout and a compact action-oriented plan.

Memory: **backboard.io **powers /api/place-research: responses include a thread id stored in the browser so later requests continue the same thread—used for the short brief on location pages and for the richer panel after a city search.

Prize Categories

Best use of Google Gemini **
Best use of **Backboard.io

DEV Community: Aayush Sapkota