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One earthquake, heard by 113 seismometers

On 19 August 2018 a magnitude 8.2 broke 600 km beneath Fiji — deep enough that nobody was hurt and nothing was damaged, big enough that the whole planet rang. This is the hour that followed at 113 seismometers, one trace each, stacked at the station's true angular distance from the epicentre. Press play. The wiggles do not start at random: the ground first moves at Monasavu in Fiji, 3.6° away, 1 min 24 s after the rupture, and last in the Canary Islands, 160.4° away and most of the way round the world, 18 min 59 s after. In between the onsets lie on a curve that flattens as it goes — the first 45° of arc cost 6.0 minutes, the next 45° cost 4.5, and the 45° after that only 3.5, because a wave crossing a longer arc dives deeper and the rock down there carries it faster. Every trace is scaled to its own largest swing, so the nearest station and the furthest are drawn the same height: what this shows is timing, not size. Nothing is modelled — there is no predicted curve over the data. Tap or hover any trace.

Starlight, spread into its colours

The 131 spectra of the standard reference atlas of starlight, hottest at the top, coolest at the bottom. Colour is the wavelength, brightness is the flux measured there, and the dark bands are what that kind of star swallows. Press play. Hydrogen is deepest at A2 and a quarter of that by G2; the calcium K line, absent from the hottest rows, is the deepest band measured anywhere in the atlas by M9; titanium oxide switches on in the last twenty rows and nowhere else. Grey is light outside the window an eye works in — an M9 giant puts 0.2% of its light in there, against 56% for an F0 bright giant. Each row is an average of many real stars of its type, not a photograph of one named star. Tap or hover any row.

Wikipedia's most-read page, every day of 2025

The one page English Wikipedia read most on each day of 2025 — 362 of the year's 365 days — set as a single paragraph, one block per day, each as wide as the number of times that day's page was opened. The scale is the same from the first block to the last, so a day in March and a day in October mean the same thing. Press play to write the year out. Most days come out at the same quiet width: the middle day of the year drew 502,003 views. But on 96 of them the winner was a page running at a hundred times or more its own ordinary traffic — something the language had not been reading at all until that morning. And a few days take a whole line to themselves. The widest is 10 September 2025, when the page for Charlie Kirk was opened 15,517,157 times: 1,779 times what it had drawn the day before, and as much as thirty-one ordinary days put together. The second widest is 8 May 2025, the day a new pope was elected. The colour is the year's plainest pattern — on 81 days the most-read page in the language was a person who had died within the previous four. Tap or hover any day.

Which way runways point

Every runway OurAirports records with two separately surveyed ends — 9,241 of them, grouped into thirteen regions — drawn on one dial at its true compass bearing, so every stroke lies parallel to the real strip of tarmac or grass. Distance from the middle is the runway's length. Press play to run the regions from the most aligned to the least. Where the wind is steady, the runways obey it: 45% of Caribbean runways lie within 20° of 080°, square into the trade winds, against the 22% an even spread would give, and Northern Europe leans the same way under the westerlies. Where the wind is variable the dial just fills in — Australia manages 25%, which is nothing. Then the American Midwest breaks it: 21% sit within 20° of its own strongest axis, no better than chance, yet 34% sit within 7.5° of true north or true east — twice an even spread — on land that was surveyed into a mile grid before it had airfields. Tap or hover any runway.

The day is not 24 hours

Every day the IERS has measured since 1962 — 23,614 of them — drawn as how much longer or shorter than exactly 24 hours the planet actually took to turn. Press play. The fine wave is the weather: the atmosphere shifts enough mass around to swing the spin by 1.26 ms over each year, longest around 28 March and shortest around 10 July. The slow arch it rides on is thought to be the liquid core trading momentum with the mantle, and it crests in 1972 — the year of the longest day on record, 4.36 ms over. Then it comes down: every year from 2020 to 2025 averaged below the line, the first run of its kind here, and the shortest day ever measured is 5 July 2024. The strip underneath is what all of this does to the clocks, and every rung in it is a second someone had to add — 27 leap seconds since 1972, and none for nine years, already the longest wait there has been. Tap or hover any day.

The world's power stations, largest to smallest

Every power station in the World Resources Institute's global inventory — 34,936 of them — drawn as one square each, its area exactly proportional to the power the station can produce, laid down largest first. Press play. The first half of the pass places 1,410 stations, 4% of the fleet, and that is already half of all the capacity listed here: dams, nuclear stations and 1,000 MW coal and gas units. What follows gets smaller and far more numerous, until the bottom 9% of the picture is 27,104 stations of under 100 MW. Isolate a fuel to see where it lives in the order: nuclear is 195 squares near the top, solar 10,665 grains near the bottom. This is nameplate capacity — what a station can make flat out, not what it does make. Tap or hover any square.

Every known atomic nucleus

Every atomic nucleus anyone has made or found — 3,386 of them — one square each, neutrons across and protons up. Press play to fill it in the order they were discovered. It does not grow outward from the middle: for thirty years everything found sits in the top corner, among the natural radioelements that announce themselves by decaying. The white spine of stable nuclei arrives almost at once — 7 of the 244 known in 1919, 133 by 1930 — once a mass spectrograph could weigh atoms one at a time. The proton-rich edge runs in flat ledges at 28, 50 and 82 protons — the closed shells. Switch the colour to half-life: of the 2,963 ever timed, 1,044 last under a second. Tap or hover any square.

One flood wave down the Guadalupe

Eleven USGS gauges on one Texas river, upstream at the top, each drawn as feet above the level it sat at on the morning of 15 July 2026 — before the rain. Press play to run the next three days. The crest passes Hunt at 03:30 on 16 July, tops 50.7 feet at Bergheim, and reaches Spring Branch 21 hours and 60 miles downstream. Then it stops: Canyon Dam holds it, the reservoir behind the dam climbs 19 feet, and the four gauges below the dam record nothing of it. The Kerrville gauge stops reporting for 3 h 30 min right after its highest reading, so its true crest is unknown. Tap or hover any gauge.

Nine years of gravitational waves

Every detection LIGO, Virgo and KAGRA have published masses for — 282 since September 2015 — placed by the two objects that collided: the heavier one across, the lighter one up, both measured in Suns. Press play to run the nine years a quarter at a time; between observing runs the detectors are dark and nothing arrives. Almost everything crowds the diagonal, because these things pair up with something close to their own size. The strip underneath counts every object on the same scale, and it has a hole in it: of 564 masses here, one falls between 3 and 5 Suns. Tap or hover any detection.

Madrid's summer nights are getting hotter

Every night in one city from 1 June to 30 September, 1920 to now, drawn as one ridge per summer — how many of that summer's nights fell to each temperature. Press play to run down the century: the pile slides steadily right, from a middle of 15.8 °C in the first thirty summers to 18.4 °C in the last thirty, while the 20 °C line stays where it is. Above that line a night never cools down at all, and Madrid has gone from about 11 of them a summer to about 38 — a fixed threshold sitting in the fat part of a moving distribution. One station in one park, urban heat island and all. Tap or hover any summer.

Five centuries of tree rings

Sixteen forest regions from the International Tree-Ring Data Bank, drawn as sixteen strips of timber — one ring for every year from 1500 to 1995, dark and heavy where that region's trees grew badly. Press play to lay the grain down. Most bad years are local: the American Southwest blackens in droughts nobody in Fennoscandia noticed, and the strips mostly disagree. The 1810s are the exception — 1813, 1819, 1820, 1821 and 1824 darken forest after forest on both sides of the equator, in the decade after Tambora erupted. Then 1887 does the same thing with no famous cause. A narrow ring means growth was poor, not that the year was cold. Tap or hover any year.

El Niño and La Niña since 1950

The Oceanic Niño Index — the temperature anomaly in the central equatorial Pacific that NOAA uses to declare an El Niño or a La Niña — for every overlapping season since 1950, wrapped one decade to a row. Press play to weave it: rust above the line is warm, blue below is cool. The pale band on every year boundary is the three seasons that straddle New Year, and the ocean has no calendar, yet 37 of the 42 episodes here crested inside one. Switch to the water off Peru and 1983 grows a bulge the official index never had. Tap or hover any season.

Six chokepoints for the world's oil

Seaborne crude oil — from the country it loaded in, through the narrow waterway it crossed, to the country it discharged in. These are the six passages the US Energy Information Administration breaks down by origin and destination. Press play from 2020 to mid-2025: Red Sea attacks shut the Bab el-Mandeb at the end of 2023, Iraq's Suez ribbon collapses and Iraqi crude reappears the long way round the Cape of Good Hope, while sanctioned Russian barrels thicken the Danish Straits into a new ribbon to India. Each waterway counts its own traffic, so a Gulf cargo bound for China is counted at Hormuz and again at Malacca. Tap or hover any country or waterway.

Where we've landed on the Moon

Every spacecraft that has reached the lunar surface since 1959 — soft landings, sample returns, deliberate impacts and crashes — placed on the side of the Moon it came down on. Press play: 51 arrivals crowd the near side and only 7 have ever reached the far side, where nothing came down intact until Chang'e 4 in 2019. The south-polar disc stays empty until 1999, then fills in a single generation. Tap or hover any site.

70 years of the yield curve

Every month's US Treasury yield curve since 1953 as one colour field — time across, maturity up, colour is the interest rate. Press play: the bright spine is that month's actual curve, and it flips upside down before every recession. The strip below is the 10-year minus 3-month spread; when it dips rust, short money pays more than long, and a recession band has followed nearly every time. Hover any month.

The world is getting older

Every country's population by age, 1950 to 2023: one small pyramid per country, children at the base, elders at the top, youngest countries first. Press play and the triangles narrow into towers as birth rates fall and lifespans grow. The rust bands are people over 65. In 1950, 18 countries had a median age over 30; today it is 133. Tap or hover any country.

Antarctic sea ice, 1979–2026

Daily sea ice extent around Antarctica, one line per year, on a shared calendar. The grey corridor is the range the ice held every day from 1981 to 2010 — and for 35 years every line stayed inside it. In 2016 the ice fell out the bottom; 2023 spent 357 of its 365 days below anything in the baseline and the winter peak has not recovered since.

Every total solar eclipse, 2001–2100

The paths of all 67 total solar eclipses this century, on a globe you can spin, each drawn at its true width — a band only a few hundred kilometres across. Press play to light them up in date order; the next crosses Greenland, Iceland and Spain on 12 August 2026. Drag to spin; tap any band.

45 years of Mediterranean wildfires

Burned area in the five Mediterranean countries EFFIS has tracked continuously since 1980, stacked year by year. Ordinary summers have been shrinking since the 1980s; the worst years have not — 1985 and 2017 still stand almost level. Click a country to pull its years forward.

Every known pulsar

Every pulsar we have measured — dead neutron stars whose radio beams sweep past Earth on a fixed period — plotted on the galactic sky, each blinking at its real spin rate: some once a second, some 700 times a second. Drag the filter to keep only the fastest.

A century of geomagnetic storms

Earth's geomagnetic activity, logged every three hours since 1932 as the Kp index and drawn as the swing of a compass needle. Quiet years barely move it; the Sun's 11-year cycle breathes underneath; the biggest storms — 1989, 2003, 2024 — push the needle to the pin and light the sky with aurora.

Every Tour de France route

Every stage of every Tour de France since 1903, on one map. Press play to watch 123 editions accumulate: early races that crossed the whole country point to point, the mid-century hexagon, and the modern loops that start abroad.

75 years of American tornadoes

Every tornado NOAA has logged since 1950 — more than 73,000 — each drawn from touchdown to lift-off and coloured by strength. Press play: weak tornadoes build up as a haze, the violent few cut deep red lines, and Tornado Alley appears on its own.

Ten thousand years of volcanic eruptions

Every eruption in the Smithsonian's Holocene record — 11,089 of them — on one map, sized and coloured by explosivity. Press play to run through deep time: mostly gentle lava fields, plus the handful of cataclysms that darkened whole skies. Tap or hover any dot.

150 years of sunspots

Every sunspot group observed since 1874, plotted by the latitude where it appeared. The pattern draws itself: each 11-year cycle opens near 30 degrees, drifts to the equator, and dies there as the next cycle opens above it.

A year in six American rivers

Six rivers' daily flow, each drawn as one typical year. The Willamette peaks with January rain, the Yellowstone with June snowmelt. The Colorado below Glen Canyon Dam has almost no seasons left — the dam switched them off in 1963.

Which days Americans are born

Twenty-one years of US birth records on one calendar, with the weekday effect removed. Christmas runs 41% below an ordinary day, the 13th of every month dips, and mid-September peaks. Deliveries are scheduled now, and the calendar shows it.

A year of tides at six harbours

Every day of one year's tide at six American harbours, each day drawn as a ring on a 24-hour clock. Anchorage swings 11 metres; Honolulu less than one. Bright rings are the spring tides that follow new and full moons. Tap or hover any ring.

Every exoplanet found so far

All 6,000-plus confirmed planets beyond the Sun on one turning field — placed by the length of their year, moving at true relative speed, coloured by how they were discovered. The empty middle is real: our methods still miss most small, slow worlds.

Every recorded meteorite

All 45,716 meteorites in the scientific record, on one map, sized by mass. The bright ones were seen falling; the rest were found later — so the map also shows where people went looking. Press play for the timeline.

Every World Cup goal

All 3,637 goals from every World Cup, men's and women's, 1930 to 2022, placed on the minute they were scored. Goals pile up toward the end of each half. Tap or hover any dot; filter by tournament.

45 years of hurricanes

Every tropical cyclone tracked since 1980, drawn as one atlas of storm paths — brighter where the wind blew harder. Each ocean basin's shape, season and quiet zones draw themselves.

Everything we've left in orbit

All 33,000-plus tracked objects circling Earth, at their real altitudes, each ring moving at its true orbital speed — satellites, spent rockets, and a great deal of debris. Hover to identify anything.

Every nuclear explosion

All 2,057 nuclear detonations, from Trinity in 1945 to North Korea's last test, as bubbles sized by yield. After the 1963 test-ban treaty the giants move underground. Press play to run the timeline.

Every undersea internet cable

All 717 submarine cables that carry nearly all intercontinental internet traffic, drawn across the seafloor. Hover any fibre for its name and route.

Eleven years of war in Ukraine

Every violent event recorded in Ukraine by the Uppsala Conflict Data Program since 2014, mapped through time. The Donbas front line smoulders for eight years; in February 2022 the whole map ignites. Each dot is documented deaths.

147 years of global temperature

Monthly global temperature since 1880, drawn as one continuous line circling the calendar and spiralling outward as the world warms. The most recent rings sit far outside the earliest ones.

How the world makes electricity

Forty years of world electricity generation, stacked by source. The fossil base has never shrunk; wind and solar are the fast-growing wedge arriving on top. Scrub to any year.

Every wind turbine in America

Every wind turbine in the United States, one glowing point per machine, from the first 1980s California farms to today. Press play to watch four decades of build-out.

The last 30 days of earthquakes

Every earthquake of magnitude 1 or higher recorded in the past 30 days, sized by energy and coloured by depth. The data refreshes nightly, so this page is never the same twice. Drag the globe; tap any quake.

Every orbital launch since Sputnik

All 7,100-plus orbital launch attempts since 1957, one square per launch: the Cold War surge, the quiet 1990s, and the commercial boom of the last decade. Tap any square for its mission.