Radial values: real PREM. Lateral features: a faithful synthesis of published tomography.
The scan — what you're seeingⓘ
14 real tomography models, combined live.
Colour = how fast seismic waves travel = the rock's temperature & stiffness. Motion (sinking / rising) is inferred from that — it is not a direct movement reading.
slow / hotaveragefast / cold
Blue = fast → cold, stiff rock, usually sinking (slabs)
Red = slow → hot, soft rock, usually rising (plumes, piles)
Hatched / faint = no readings — theory's guess only, not measured
subducted slab (cold)
LLSVP — giant hot pile
ULVZ — melt at the core
mantle plume (hot)
cratonic root (cold)
ridge / rift (hot)
Same data, coloured by what the feature is rather than its speed.
At this depthⓘ
The scan picks out
—
Conditions
—temperatureⓘ
—pressure
—density
—shear speed baseline
how well we've scanned here—
solid scan coverage
What we know here
—
Data pipelineⓘ
Model inputs
clustering
threshold0.50
smooth0.30
agreement min0.40
visualization
A THIRD MAP OF THE EARTH
You're looking inside the planet.
Ordinary globes show the outside — coastlines, borders, terrain. This one looks inward. As you slide the depth control down, you cut a horizontal slice through the Earth and see two things stacked on top of each other:
① THE SCAN — sharp
What earthquakes reveal: how fast seismic waves travel at this depth — i.e. how hot/cold & stiff the rock is. (Colour shows temperature, not motion; we infer sinking/rising from it.)
Red = slower → hotter, softer, rising Blue = faster → colder, stiffer, sinking Faint = we've barely scanned here
② THE MODEL — blurry
Behind the scan glows the textbook Earth: the smooth, layered reference model (PREM). It's deliberately out of focus — a prediction, not an observation.
Where the scan has no coverage (especially the deep core), the blurry model brightens and takes over. That hand-off is the whole idea.
③ THE 3-D BODIES — how they're derived
Data bodies come straight from the measurements: the 14 tomography models are averaged on a (lon, lat, depth) grid, lightly smoothed, kept only where the models agree, then meshed into 3-D form (surfaces / volume / points / wire) at a chosen anomaly threshold — blue = fast/cold, red = slow/hot. Tune all of this in the Data-pipeline panel.
Extracted features are an interpretation, not derived from those models: hand-curated named structures (slabs, LLSVPs, plumes, cratons, ridges) placed at their published locations from the literature. So a plume won't sit exactly on the data's red blob — they're two different things. The survey-link dial fades each feature toward how strongly the measured ensemble actually supports it there.
Drag to orbit · scroll to zoom · click a boundary to jump there · hover a body for info, click to isolate it. Coastlines: Natural Earth. Reference model: PREM (Dziewonski & Anderson 1981). Built with three.js.
HOW WE KNOW
Everything public that maps the Earth's inside
We have never drilled past ~12 km. Everything deeper is inferred — mostly from earthquakes, plus gravity, magnetism, tiny particles, and lab physics. These are the public datasets & models behind that inference.
gathering sources…
FIELD GUIDE
What are these features?
A quick taxonomy of what lives inside the Earth. Blue = fast = cold/stiff; red = slow = hot/soft. "Motion" is inferred from temperature, not measured.
CONFIGURATIONS
Presets
Save the whole current view — depth, every layer, all dials, the data pipeline & enabled models — under a name. Click one to restore it; ★ sets the default that loads automatically. Or copy a share link to send a view to someone.