Biomes & ecosystems
Explore tropical forests, deserts, grasslands, boreal forests, tundra, wetlands, and polar areas. Reference colours help explain ecology, not replace detailed land-cover surveys.
Continue to Ecology Lab → SCIENCE ATLAS / EARTH SYSTEMS / SMOOTH 3D + TIME
Earth, with a new perspective.
Glide around realistic NASA Earth imagery, then reveal a bright climate-cell mosaic: rainforests, deserts, savannas, boreal forests, tundra and more, all visible together. Spin, pinch to zoom, fly between regions, and explore illustrative changes over time.
What is real? Satellite Earth uses NASA Blue Marble imagery. Climate cells are vivid educational 2° × 2° aggregations of approximate biome categories, not observed Köppen classes or satellite measurements. Climate impacts and future years remain illustrative teaching scenarios. Methods & credits.
02 / INTERACTIVE EARTH
3D ROTATION + 4D TIMEA more vivid view of Earth
REFERENCE / COLOUR CELLS4.0°S, 61.0°W
DRAG TO SPIN · PINCH TO ZOOM · TAP TO SELECT
Preparing the interactive Earth…
04 / TIME EXPLORER
Explore change through time
Move between past, present and future illustration states. This is a teaching scenario, not a forecast.
2030Illustrative future scenario
199020102030205020752100
Illustrative index: future conditions are not observations or CMIP model output.
05 / EXPLORE MORE
See the patterns. Understand the limits.
Climate as a system
Compare simplified gradients of temperature and rainfall with the ecosystems they help support. Real climate is shaped by oceans, mountains, atmospheric circulation, and many other processes.
Continue to Planetary Systems →Climate change & uncertainty
Use the timeline to explore how a conceptual impact overlay responds to selected assumptions. For real trends and future projections, follow the original research sources below.
Explore the Amazon evidence →Methods, data & scientific limitations
V2 educational visualization (Climate Globe v6): The realistic land and ocean image comes from NASA Blue Marble: Next Generation (Earth Observatory), reproduced at reduced resolution for interactive display. The colour-cell layer is built by dividing EESP's pre-existing approximate biome reference raster into 2° by 2° geographic cells, assigning each cell its dominant approximate ecosystem class and clipping it to the existing land mask. The cells are deliberately categorical teaching illustrations: not measured climate data, not observed Köppen-Geiger classification, not real-time land cover and not forecasts. Natural Earth supplies the earlier geographic references; NASA Blue Marble is surface imagery, not real-time monitoring. Drought, wildfire, forest conversion, biodiversity and coastline overlays remain conceptual. The time slider changes the illustration intensity only, never the observed surface imagery or the cell classification. Real gridded historical classifications and scenario-specific projections require separate validated datasets such as Beck et al. (2023).