Sara Loera

Posted on Apr 19

I gave Earth a Wrapped. thisyear.earth

#devchallenge #weekendchallenge #earthday #solana

DEV Weekend Challenge: Earth Day

This is a submission for Weekend Challenge: Earth Day Edition

What I Built

Earth Wrapped · MMXXVI

Earth is the narrator.
The year is the subject.
The reader is asked to answer back.

thisyear.earth is an immersive climate year-in-review told across eleven full screen chapters. It borrows the emotional shape of a wrapped recap, then turns the perspective inside out: the account belongs to Earth, the receipts are climate data, and the final action is not to share a playlist, it is to leave a pledge.

The experience moves through:

Preface · The Record
Coordinates
The Fever
The Atmosphere
The Melt
The Canopy
The Ledger
The Roll Call
The Residue
The Turn
Epilogue · Sincerely

At the end, Earth asks for one small thing.

You write a pledge for the year ahead.
You can sign it.
You can leave it anonymous.
And if you want it to remain, you can mint it to the ledger.

That pledge becomes part of thisyear.earth/ledger — a public record with on-chain proof behind it.

Why I made it

Climate data is everywhere, and somehow still easy to ignore.

The numbers exist. They are published. They are updated. They are cited. But a spreadsheet does not stop you in the middle of your day. A PDF does not follow you into Monday morning. A chart rarely makes you feel the weight of what it represents.

I wanted to build something that made the data land. Something that could turn 429 ppm into a condition, 1.17 trillion tonnes of ice lost into memory, and renewables up 32% into relief that had to be earned.

So I gave Earth a Wrapped.

Demo

🌍 thisyear.earth

🗒️ thisyear.earth/ledger — the permanent pledge record

Why Solana mattered

The ledger is the part I care about most.

Not because it is “web3.”

Because it turns a passing interaction into a record.

When someone mints a pledge, the app creates a real memo transaction on Solana Devnet for the challenge build. The transaction hash and mint metadata are stored in the app’s database, and the public ledger page renders those sealed pledges in a readable, shareable, and verifiable format.

The ledger is not a crypto dashboard.

It is a book of names and promises.

A reader can follow the Explorer link and verify that the pledge exists on-chain. For the challenge build, that proof currently lives on Devnet rather than Mainnet.

What mattered to me was the split:

Neon serves the ledger and app data quickly
Solana acts as the proof layer underneath

How I built it

The site uses separate shells for mobile and desktop:

Mobile: swipeable full-screen sequence
Desktop: scroll-driven atmospheric narrative

The stack:

Next.js 16 — App Router, Turbopack, React 19
TypeScript — strict mode
Tailwind CSS + Framer Motion — layout, motion, transitions
Neon — pledge and location persistence
Solana — memo-based Devnet pledge minting
globe.gl — final globe visualization
Lenis — desktop scroll behavior

The data

The climate data is real.

The CO₂ card fetches daily live readings from the NOAA GML CSV at the Mauna Loa Observatory. The other cards use annual or authoritative reported figures, cited in the experience itself.

Card	Source
CO₂ · 429 ppm	NOAA GML — Mauna Loa Observatory
Temperature · +1.55°C	NASA GISS + NOAA Climate.gov
Ice · 1.17T tonnes	NSIDC + NASA GRACE-FO
Forest · 14.9M hectares	Global Forest Watch + WRI
Species · 41,046	IUCN Red List
Plastic · 413 Mt	OECD + UNEP
Wildfires	NASA FIRMS
Renewables · +32%	IEA + IRENA

The design

This project could have gone in a loud, celebratory direction. I tried that path at first. It felt wrong. The subject matter did not want confetti. It wanted gravity.

So the final direction became typographic, atmospheric, and editorial, not because it was trendy, but because it was the only version that felt honest.

Prize category

Best Use of Solana

Every minted pledge creates a real Solana Devnet memo transaction.

The app keeps the ledger readable and fast by serving it from Neon, while each sealed pledge links to its on-chain proof on Solana. That gave me the best of both worlds: a public record people can actually read, and a proof layer underneath it that is real and verifiable.

Special thanks

Special thanks to the scientists and researchers who maintain these datasets year after year — NOAA GML at Mauna Loa Observatory, NASA GISS, NSIDC, Global Forest Watch, the IUCN Red List, and the IEA.

Cover image uses Earth imagery courtesy of NASA.