Deep Time — the whole history of Earth, at true scale

a young star in a flat ring of dust and ice, seen at a shallow angle so the ring reads as a wide ellipse: a small brilliant white-gold point at the centre, the ring warm cream and pale amber close in, cooling to soft blue-grey at its outer edge, grainy and translucent, with a few faint concentric gaps ploughed through it — 4,567 million years ago The Solar System forms Dust and ice collapse around a new star. Nothing older has ever been dated. That star is the Sun. The disc becomes the planets.

a ball of liquid rock, glowing orange-red, brighter yellow-white cracks, a few darker cooling crusts floating on it — 4,540 million years ago Earth reaches full size Accretion finishes. The whole surface is molten rock. There is no ocean yet, and no air to be blue.

a small newly-made Moon, lumpy and rough rather than a clean sphere, its crust a mottled dull red-brown split by bright yellow-orange molten seams, with a partial arc of hot debris — separate glowing fragments and dust in orange and pale gold — curving around it and stopping well short of the edges of the picture — at least 4,510 million years ago The Moon is torn out A Mars-sized body strikes, at least 4.51 billion years ago. The debris becomes a Moon that hangs enormous and close. The Moon began as molten rock, not the grey rock it is now.

The Moon is two and a half times wider than it is today

the whole Earth as a complete circular disc seen from space, face-on and lit evenly to its rim: a cooling crust of mid grey and warm brown broken by a web of glowing orange-yellow cracks, torn sheets of white steam cloud drifting across it, and a scatter of small pools of standing water catching the light between the cracks — 4,404 million years ago Liquid water A single zircon crystal records water at the surface. A single crystal proves water was here. Not that an ocean was.

a single pitted, etched volcanic rock in mid-toned warm grey and rust, its pits shown as shallow dents a shade or two darker than the surface, with pale streaks of rain running down its face — 4,300 million years ago Steam and acid rain The air is CO₂. The rain is acid. There is nothing yet you would call land. Volcanic gas dissolves in the rain and turns it acid.

a hand-sized slab of grey-beige banded rock, its bands running in soft parallel waves, with a scatter of small dark purple-red garnet flecks caught in the pale bands — at least 4,160 million years ago The oldest surviving crust Nuvvuagittuq, Quebec — a scrap of the first ocean floor. Crust is the planet's thin outer shell of rock.

a hand-sized slab of streaky rock, straight alternating bands of pale pinkish-grey and darker brownish-grey, with a few small red garnet flecks — 4,031 million years ago The oldest rock we still have Acasta gneiss — banded rock, north-west Canada. The Hadean ends here because this is where the record starts. A gneiss is rock cooked and squeezed into bands.

a hand-sized slab of fine-grained rock split along its bedding, showing dozens of thin, slightly wavy parallel layers stacked like the pages of a closed book, pale grey-green throughout — 3,800 million years ago The oldest sedimentary rocks Isua, Greenland — mud, laid down under water, by a real ocean. Sedimentary rock is settled mud, turned to stone.

the same pale grey-green layered rock as the Isua sediment beside it on this page — a cool sage grey-green overall, with no warm buff or brown in it — holding one clear lens of sooty carbon: a single flattened mid-grey smear, wider than it is tall, lying along the layering near the middle of the slab, its edges feathering out into the stone — 3,700 million years ago The first trace of life Carbon of the kind life prefers, in Isua sediment. Not a fossil — a chemical shadow, and the oldest one anyone accepts. The dark lens is carbon. Its isotopes are the only trace life left.

a block of microbial mat seen from the side at its cut edge, so the layers show: a wrinkled olive-green skin on top, a band of dull rose-pink under it, and pale grey sediment below that — three flat bands stacked in order, the top one puckered into low ridges — 3,600 million years ago Microbial mats Life is a film on the seabed, and stays that way for three billion years. All life is a film on the seabed, a few millimetres thick.

a rounded, layered mound of banded rock, like a stack of thin stone plates or a cross-section of a cabbage — 3,480 million years ago Stromatolites Mats build the first structures life leaves behind. Whether these particular ones did is still argued. A mound of rock, built layer by layer by microbes.

a cluster of tiny rod- and sphere-shaped cells at high magnification, translucent pale yellow-green, each scattered with vivid lemon-yellow sulfur granules inside it like mustard seeds suspended in glass — the whole cluster reads as a bright clean lemon-yellow — 3,400 million years ago Microbes that eat sulfur No oxygen, no sunlight needed — chemistry alone. Microbes are single cells, far too small to see.

the same cratered asteroid in flight — cool neutral blue-grey, clearly longer than it is wide like a potato, pitted all over with shallow overlapping craters — with its leading edge alight: that whole front face glowing white-hot, softening back through yellow and pale apricot into the grey along its flanks, like an iron bar heated at one end — 3,260 million years ago A fifty-kilometre asteroid S2, the largest impact in the rock record — 50 to 200 times the mass of the one that killed the dinosaurs. It boils the top of the ocean, and life gets better. S2 names the layer of debris it left behind.

the whole Earth as a complete circular disc seen from space, face-on and lit evenly to its rim, under a thin warm haze: a flat mid-green ocean over almost all of it, with a dozen small patches of bare grey and salmon-pink rock lying flush in it — ragged, irregular coastlines, flat against the surface like countries on a globe — 3,220 million years ago The first continents Cratons, the ancient cores of continents, stabilise. There is now permanent dry land. The sea is green. It is full of dissolved iron that has not rusted out yet.

a single gently curved filament of cells strung end to end like a string of beads inside a clear sheath, each cell a rounded cylinder, the whole filament a strong blue-green teal — 3,000 to 2,400 million years ago Photosynthesis Cyanobacteria, the blue-green scum on any pond, split water and let the oxygen go. It will take 600 million years to matter. Turning sunlight into food. Oxygen is the waste.

the whole Earth as a complete circular disc seen from space, face-on and lit evenly to its rim, veiled in a thin orange-tan haze that lies over everything: white ice capping the TOP and the BOTTOM of the disc and reaching down and up from them in ragged lobes and tongues, further on one side than the other, and between them a wide open sea of deep green running across the middle with an irregular, uneven edge — 2,900 million years ago The first ice age The Pongola glaciation. Ice at mid-latitudes, on a planet with no oxygen. Named for the Pongola rocks in South Africa.

a loose drifting raft of many filaments lying across one another in a flat open layer, each filament plainly made of rounded cells stacked end to end like a string of beads with the separate cells clearly visible, the whole raft a deep blue-green teal — the same colour and the same beaded strands as the single filament earlier on this page — 2,800 million years ago Cyanobacteria, everywhere Still no free oxygen in the air — the rock is drinking all of it. Cyanobacteria: the blue-green scum on a pond.

a cluster of small round bubbles rising off a mat of green scum — the bubbles silver-white and colourless, each a bright thin rim around a pale near-white centre, like bubbles in a glass of sparkling water, largest at the mat and smaller as they rise — 2,700 million years ago Whiffs of oxygen Oxygen appears in patches, hundreds of millions of years before the air changes. Patches of it, in the sea. None in the air.

The sky flickers orange and back, three to five times

a cut block of banded iron formation standing on end, crossed by dozens of narrow wavy parallel bands — deep brick-red and maroon jasper alternating with silver-grey iron layers, the bands gently folded, varying in thickness, some pinching out and some swelling; the dominant colour is a deep brick-red — 2,600 million years ago Banded iron Oxygen meets dissolved iron and it rusts out of the sea, in bands, for a billion years. Rust in layers. Iron mines dig this rock.

the same banded iron formation as earlier on this page, drawn as a broader, thicker slab — many more red-and-silver bands stacked across it, the layering denser and the folding tighter; the dominant colour is again a deep brick-red — 2,500 million years ago Banded iron, still Still rusting out of the sea. It has been a hundred million years. Rust, still settling out of the sea, layer on layer.

smooth and featureless like Titan, thick orange-tan haze, faint soft banding, no continents or oceans visible — 2,430 million years ago The Great Oxidation begins Free oxygen floods the air and poisons most of the life that made it. Thick methane haze hides the surface and turns the sky orange.

a single dark slate-grey boulder half-buried in fine layered pale grey-green mud, punched down into it so the layers directly beneath are pushed into a deep U-shaped sag under its weight while the layers above drape up and over it — a dropstone, the signature of ice rafting; the dominant colour is a cool grey-green, with no warm buff or orange anywhere in it — 2,400 million years ago The Huronian glaciation Oxygen destroys the methane greenhouse and the planet freezes, three times over. Named for Lake Huron, where the rocks are.

The sky is blue

the whole Earth as a complete circular disc seen from space, face-on and lit evenly to its rim, and sharp for the first time with no haze over it: an unbroken mid-green ocean across the whole disc, thin white cloud drawn out in streaks over it, and a bright thin rim of blue atmosphere around the edge — 2,220 million years ago The Great Oxidation ends Oxygen is permanent. The haze never comes back. The Great Oxidation: when the air first held oxygen.

several flat, lobed, coin-sized discs on a slab of cool slate-grey mudstone with a faint violet cast, each disc a pale pyritic cream with a wrinkled, crumpled raised rim and a smoother middle, its outline irregular and lobed like a blob of dried wax pressed into the rock; the dominant colour is a cool violet-grey, never buff or brown — 2,100 million years ago Francevillian structures — identity disputed Centimetre-scale shapes in Gabon. Possibly the oldest multicellular life; possibly not life at all. Named for Franceville, the Gabon rock they sit in.

Oxygen falls back

a single flat ribbon lying on an unbanded slab of dark rust-red iron-rich rock as one large open ring, like a rubber band or a loop of tape dropped flat on a table — a wide empty circle of bare rock in the middle of the loop, one end of the ribbon visibly stopping short and lapping past the other so it reads as a length of ribbon rather than a closed circle, the loop slightly uneven the way a dropped band lies rather than a perfect machined circle, the ribbon exactly the same width from one end to the other — a flat matte pewter-grey film pressed into the face of the rock and flush with it, stained into the stone rather than sitting on it — 1,870 million years ago Grypania — identity disputed A coiled ribbon in Michigan iron. Big enough to see, but nothing of its cells survives. Grypania names the ribbon, not what made it.

Banded iron stops

a short straight filament of seven or eight large box-shaped cells joined end to end like the carriages of a train, each cell a translucent fresh grass-green and far chunkier than a bacterium, holding one softly-defined rounded body inside it — 1,635 million years ago The first complex cells Qingshania — cells with a nucleus, stuck together on purpose. A nucleus is the sac that holds a cell's DNA.

a short upright tuft of red alga in a deep saturated wine-red, almost purple: a single unbranched filament of stacked disc-shaped cells, like a narrow pile of coins, anchored at its base by a small holdfast — 1,047 million years ago Sex Bangiomorpha, a red seaweed. The oldest known sexual reproduction.

a specimen of folded gneiss — a banded rock whose pink, grey and pale mineral stripes are bent into tight parallel folds, as if the layers had been squeezed from both sides — 1,000 million years ago Rodinia Every continent, gathered into one mass. Rodinia is Russian for homeland.

a lump of warm honey-cream reef limestone sliced open on one flat cut face, and that whole cut face filled edge to edge with a dense fine mesh of hundreds of thin rust-orange worm-like tubes, tangled and winding at every angle and far too many to count — the vermicular texture inside a bath sponge, or a plate of tangled thread — 890 million years ago The first sponges — identity disputed Sponge-like structures in Canadian reef rock, 300 million years before any agreed animal. A sponge is an animal. No head, no organs.

The Boring Billion ends

ice pole to pole, pale blue-grey fracture lines like cracked porcelain, a few small bare rock patches near the middle — 717 million years ago Snowball Earth Ice reaches the tropics. The Sturtian freeze lasts 56 million years. The whole planet freezes, pole to equator.

the whole Earth as a complete circular disc seen from space, face-on and lit evenly to its rim: still almost entirely white ice, but broken open across the middle — a widening band of blue-green meltwater at the equator with pale floes drifting in it, and fracture lines running out of that band into the ice on either side — 661 million years ago The ice retreats Cap carbonate, a warm-sea rock, laid down in a few thousand years on top of the ice. The freeze lasted 56 million years. The thaw did not.

the whole Earth as a complete circular disc seen from space, face-on and lit evenly to its rim: open blue ocean across the whole disc, two bright white caps of ice left at the top and the bottom of it, and thin white cloud drawn out across the water — 635 million years ago The ice breaks for good A second freeze, the Marinoan glaciation — perhaps only four million years — and then it is over. The Ediacaran, the period before the Cambrian, begins. The last global freeze. Nothing since comes close.

a frond like a fern or chestnut leaf, branching ridges repeating as smaller copies of themselves down its length, rooted to the seabed by a small disc — 574 million years ago Charnia The first big bodies — soft, strange, rooted to the seabed. A frond, unlike anything alive today.

a trilobite seen from directly above: a flat oval shield divided lengthwise into three lobes, a broad crescent head with a raised ridge running down its middle and one crescent eye on the cheek either side of that ridge, a jointed thorax of repeated segments, and a small tail plate, the whole shield a deep violet-blue with pale cream margins along its rim — 538.8 million years ago The Cambrian begins Shells, eyes, guts, predators, and the first things burrowing through mud on purpose. The Cambrian: when animals get hard parts.

a flattened, segmented swimmer with rows of side fins like a shrimp, two large stalked eyes, two long spiny grasping arms held out in front like a pair of curved combs, and underneath the head a small circular ring of overlapping plates, like a camera aperture, as its mouth — 508 million years ago The Burgess Shale Anomalocaris — a metre of segmented predator, with the first real eyes. One Canadian quarry that kept soft bodies.

a flat microscope slide view of a cryptospore tetrad in transmitted light: FOUR thin-walled circles fused into a two-by-two clover, two above and two below, each touching both of its neighbours — drawn flat with no volume and no roundness at all, their shared walls a fine darker amber line, their interiors a pale washed translucent amber you can see straight through, and the whole outer wall carrying a fine even ornament of tiny bumps and pits like hammered or frosted glass — 470 million years ago Plants reach land Spores, nothing you could call a plant yet. Land has been bare for four billion years. Spores under a microscope. Nothing on land is bigger than this.

several graptolite fossils fanning out from one point on a neutral pale grey shale slab with no warm or brown cast — each a narrow straight strip edged with fine regular teeth, like the blade of a hacksaw flattened into the rock, the fossil film a silvery mid-grey against the paler slab — 445 million years ago The Late Ordovician extinction Ice, then anoxia — the ocean runs out of oxygen. About 85% of species go. The Ordovician: the age of shelled sea life.

a few centimetres of forking, leafless green stems, splitting into two even branches again and again, with small rounded capsules at the branch tips — 420 million years ago Cooksonia The first plants with stems. A few centimetres tall, and the tallest thing alive. Bare forking stems, and no leaves anywhere.

a coelacanth seen from directly overhead, lying flat on a stream bed and looked straight down upon from above: the same heavy scales, the same broad three-lobed tail, the same deep steel-blue mottled with pale blue-white flecks, and a pair of thick fleshy-based front fins spread out to either side, each ending in a fan of stiff fin-rays — and at the front, instead of an ordinary fish head, a broad flat spade much wider than the body, with both eyes sitting up on the flat top surface of it near the middle, looking straight up out of the picture at the viewer — 375 million years ago Tiktaalik A fish with a neck, and wrists. The fin bones here are the bones in an arm.

a giant dragonfly, long segmented body, two pairs of long net-veined wings held flat to the sides — 320 million years ago The coal forests Trees 40 metres tall, in swamps that become every coal seam on Earth. The air is 30% oxygen and the dragonflies are 70 cm across. Coal is these trees, buried and compressed.

a lizard-like animal with a tall sail of skin down its back, held up by long spines — 295 million years ago Dimetrodon Not a dinosaur. A synapsid — our own branch, 60 million years before the first dinosaur. Not a dinosaur. Closer to us than to one.

a thick slab of flood-basalt crust broken open, its top a ropy wrinkled skin in a cool pewter-grey, buckled into coils and folds like thick rope laid side by side or the skin on cooled porridge, with a narrow orange glow showing only in the deep cracks between the crusted plates — 251.9 million years ago The Great Dying Siberian basalt cooks the ocean. 81% of marine species die, in about 60,000 years — one and a half pixels. The largest extinction in Earth's history.

two small animals side by side at the same scale, overlapping slightly so they read as one group: a slender bipedal dinosaur in muted sage-olive green with a cream underside, on long hind legs with its tail held level behind it, and beside it a shrew-sized furry mammal in warm sandy cream, on four legs with a long pointed snout — 233 to 225 million years ago The first dinosaurs, and the first mammals Both lines appear inside the same eight million years. At this scale, the same moment. The first mammals are the size of a shrew.

a phytosaur — a long low four-legged reptile whose snout is drawn out into a slender straight rod lined with small teeth, ending in a smooth solid rounded tip like the blunt end of a wooden spoon handle; set on top of the skull, directly between and just in front of the eyes, is a raised dome like a small volcano, and the two nostril openings sit on the summit of that dome, far back from the snout; four short legs, a long heavy tail, and a warm sandy bronze hide with soft darker bronze banding along the back; the eye is a small amber bead — 201.4 million years ago The Triassic–Jurassic extinction The Atlantic starts to open. Half of everything dies, and the dinosaurs inherit it. Triassic and Jurassic: the periods either side.

a raven-sized dinosaur-like animal with sharp teeth in its jaws, a long bony tail trailing straight out behind with feathers running down either side of it, and broad rounded feathered wings — its plumage a deep iridescent blue-green shot with violet, like the sheen on a magpie's wing, with pale cream bars across the flight feathers — 150 million years ago Archaeopteryx Feathers, and the first wing that works. A dinosaur with feathers, teeth and a bony tail.

a slender aquatic stem in bright fresh yellow-green with finely divided feathery leaves, carrying along its upper length a row of small paired seed pods and bare stamens attached directly to the stem, with no petals anywhere — 125 million years ago The first flowers Archaefructus: no petals yet, but a flower — the oldest anyone can date. Before this, nothing was in bloom. Before this there is no fruit, and no bees.

a huge two-legged predator held horizontal like a see-saw balanced over its hips — spine level, a long tail carried straight out behind as a counterweight — thick and deep where it leaves the hips, tapering only gradually, never a thin whip — and a short deep S-curved neck carrying a massive blunt boxy head as long as the animal's own thigh, as deep from skull-top to jaw as a bathtub is deep, broad across the snout, its jaws slightly parted on thick conical teeth; the forelimbs are tiny and held to the chest, each ending in a simple two-pronged pincer like a pair of tongs, and the hind legs are thick and bird-like with three forward-facing toes; the animal is a muted slate-grey with dark rust-red banding down its back and flanks and a pale cream underside — 68 to 66 million years ago Tyrannosaurus rex The last and largest of the tyrannosaurs, gone within two million years of the asteroid. Closer in time to us than to Stegosaurus.

the whole Earth as a disc, most of it under heavy swirling white and grey-brown storm cloud and dust, one brilliant white-hot flash and an expanding pale ring spreading from a single point, with only broken fragments of green land and blue ocean showing through the gaps — 66.04 million years ago Chicxulub Everything larger than a badger dies. The crater the asteroid left, under the Yucatán.

a small squirrel-sized animal gripping a branch, its hands and feet wrapped right around it, with a narrow pointed furry muzzle like a squirrel's, a small rounded head, large forward-facing eyes, short soft fur in a warm chestnut-red with a cream belly, and a long slender tail held out for balance — 56 million years ago The first true primates Teilhardina — not the primate-like mammals before it, but the first that living primates descend from. It appears on three continents within 25,000 years, during a sudden burst of global heat. Primates are lemurs, monkeys, apes, and us.

a slab of ice calving off a dark rock cliff into the sea — 33.9 million years ago Antarctica freezes The greenhouse world ends. The icehouse begins: ice that never melts. The ice that is still sitting there today.

a single ape skull in three-quarter view, warm ivory bone-cream throughout: a low rounded braincase, a heavy continuous brow ridge above the eyes, a short flat face and a broad palate of small worn teeth — 9.3 to 6.5 million years ago The human line splits from the chimpanzees Everything you would call human happens after this point — the next 175 pixels. No animal alive is a closer relative to humans.

4,567 million years ago The Solar System forms
4,540 million years ago Earth reaches full size
4,510 million years ago The Moon is torn out
4,404 million years ago Liquid water
4,031 million years ago The oldest rock we still have
3,700 million years ago The first trace of life
3,480 million years ago Stromatolites
3,260 million years ago A fifty-kilometre asteroid
3,000 million years ago Photosynthesis
2,900 million years ago The first ice age
2,430 million years ago The Great Oxidation begins
2,400 million years ago The Huronian glaciation
2,220 million years ago The Great Oxidation ends
1,635 million years ago The first complex cells
1,047 million years ago Sex
1,000 million years ago Rodinia
717 million years ago Snowball Earth
635 million years ago The ice breaks for good
574 million years ago Charnia
538.8 million years ago The Cambrian begins
470 million years ago Plants reach land
445 million years ago The Late Ordovician extinction
375 million years ago Tiktaalik
251.9 million years ago The Great Dying
227 million years ago The first dinosaurs, and the first mammals
201.4 million years ago The Triassic–Jurassic extinction
125 million years ago The first flowers
66.04 million years ago Chicxulub
33.9 million years ago Antarctica freezes
7 million years ago The human line splits from the chimpanzees
4.4 million years ago Ardipithecus walks upright
3.3 million years ago The first stone tools
2.8 million years ago The first Homo
1.9 million years ago Homo erectus
about 800 thousand years ago Fire, kept
300 thousand years ago Homo sapiens
51.2 thousand years ago The oldest known picture
12 thousand years ago Farming
5.4 thousand years ago Writing
250 years ago The industrial revolution

Everything after the last tick

All of
human history

The last ten happened in the final 110 of 115,000 pixels. Everything humans have farmed, written, built or remembered is the last three tenths of one pixel.

Those 4.6 billion years as a single calendar year: humans appear at 11:26 p.m. on 31 December, farming in the last ninety seconds, writing in the last forty, the industrial revolution in the last two.

Dustin ColeData