Visualizing 100k Years of Earth in WebGL

What did Earth look like when humans migrated to the Americas? Changing sea levels and large ice sheets during the last ice age played a key role in human migration and explain many archaeological sites now buried under the sea. I wanted a better way to visualize how geography shaped our history. So I built an interactive historical model of Earth, covering the last 100,000 years. It includes elevation, rising sea levels, changing climate and moving ice sheets. And it works in your browser. In this post I will explain how I built this using multiple scientific datasets, data processing, THREE.js and shaders. Want to skip ahead? Try out the demo Elevation map The most important data that I need is a global elevation map of Earth. This data contains terrain height at a specific resolution. Each pixel represents a height between -8714 and 5724 meters, peaks like Everest are not included because the actual highest point is too small. I used the ETOPO Global Relief Model from NOAA (Nati ... Read full article.