Scrub a timeline and watch the planet rebuild itself. That’s the whole idea: a 3D Earth you can drag backwards through geological time, with the continents drifting apart and the entire look of the world, oceans, land, atmosphere, ice, changing to match the era you’re standing in.
It’s a Wildlab experiment, built with React Three Fiber and three.js. Not a product; a place to keep our creative-technology muscles warm. It uses the same WebGL and shader techniques that drive the morphing animals on our own site.
Three ways to draw a planet
The sphere is drawn by a custom GLSL shader that runs in one of three modes depending on how far back you are. The oldest eras have no real paleogeography data, so they’re generated procedurally: a molten mode for the Hadean, a glowing, barely-solid surface, and a noise mode for the Archean, where simplex noise stands in for land that no map remembers. Once real reconstructed coastlines exist, it switches to a mapped mode and drapes the actual data over the globe.
Moving between eras isn’t a cut. The globe interpolates, colours, terrain and the amount of glow all lerp from one slice to the next, so dragging the timeline reads as continuous drift rather than a slideshow.
Colour as a clock
Every era carries its own palette, and it isn’t arbitrary, it’s tuned to that epoch’s actual climate and atmosphere. The Hadean is orange and violent, full volcanism, no ice. The early Archean is a hazy, iron-tinted ocean under a green-grey sky. Later eras cool into the blues you’d recognise, with volcanism dialled down and a touch of ice creeping in. Each of those is a set of shader uniforms, ocean, land, highland, atmosphere, plus volcanism, ice and molten amounts, so the planet’s whole mood is data, not a texture.
None of this is client work. It’s the kind of thing we build to stay sharp on real-time 3D, and it’s exactly the capability we bring when a client wants an experience, not a page.
This is a Field Note from Wild Interactive, a design-led engineering studio in Wellington, NZ. Originally published at wildinteractive.co.nz/field-notes/rendering-four-billion-years-of-continental-drift.
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