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Visualizing 100k Years of Earth in WebGL

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Re: Visualizing 100k Years of Earth in WebGL

#13
post #4

Interesting, but you're missing geologically important proglacial lakes, like Lake Missoula and Lake Agassiz.

Also the African humid period isn't visually apparent ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_humid_period ). But very cool!

if we're nitpicking, glaciers push down the crust they are on (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isostatic_depression) so when glaciers melt the land underneath is at first underwater before emerging

Re: Visualizing 100k Years of Earth in WebGL

#14
post #3

Very cool, the interactivity of this makes this a much better learning tool than a set of static images (for me, at least). One minor suggestion: on mobile put the date scrubber on the bottom, otherwise my thumb gets in the way of the UI while sliding back and forth through time :) Also, I’m not sure if a log scale for time makes sense in this case. It confused me for a second, at least. Great job, thanks for sharing…

Thanks for the feedback! I used log scale because it will be easier to show historical events on the timeline once I implement that. Since much more happened closer to present day

Re: Visualizing 100k Years of Earth in WebGL

#15

Awesome. I'd suggest implementing lakes that were created by ice sheets blocking rivers in the northern hemisphere (in Canada & Siberia).

Great point, I thought about it but decided it was too hard to do. But I will take another look and see if I can find some good data sources for it.

Re: Visualizing 100k Years of Earth in WebGL

#16

Northern winter and summer look very different[1] (and those don't even capture sea ice). I've puzzled over how to represent such variation. Especially with deeper time paleogeography, where those 100 kyr of ice ages and sea level changes can be the variation which needs to be aggregated. One approach is sampling biased by similarity. So you snag points in time, from similar times of year and climate states. If the i…

Thats an interesting point. I think that if the climate difference is important I would allow the user to toggle between summer and winter. Or choose based on the context if you are showing specific events like wars that were impacted by winter weather. From my research (not professional or scientific) ice sheets didn’t move much between seasons so I wouldn’t include them. When you have very large intervals of 100k years when you go further back there could be several ice ages in between so I don’t think it makes much sense there. In what context do you think that this would be important to consider?

Re: Visualizing 100k Years of Earth in WebGL

#19
post #13
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also the African humid period isn't visually apparent ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_humid_period ). But very cool!

if we're nitpicking, glaciers push down the crust they are on ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isostatic_depression ) so when glaciers melt the land underneath is at first underwater before emerging

Hardly nitpicking. The size of the two glacial lakes was phenomenal, bigger than current great lakes. Glacial lake Missoula emptying into the Pacific dug out the Channeled Scablands in Washington State.

Re: Visualizing 100k Years of Earth in WebGL

#20

doesn't seem to work on macOS with either Safari or Chrome. am i missing something?

Yeah - not rendering on MacOS Chrome or Firefox.

Current FF on Linux renders OK (on Intel HD Graphics 630 @ 1.10 GHz/Kaby Lake).
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