−540 Ma
Cambrian seafloor
London · Warm shallow seas teeming with the first complex skeletal life.
I · Earth from Orbit · Now · low orbit
A thin blue line, holding everything alive.
Four hundred kilometres above the surface, the atmosphere reads as a single luminous edge. Every forest, every ocean, every city of the eight billion sits inside that line.
II · Before Humans · −320 Ma · Carboniferous
Forests without witnesses.
Equatorial swamps of tree ferns and lycopods covered most continents. Oxygen reached thirty-five per cent. No animal looked up at the canopy. The carbon laid down here would, three hundred million years later, fuel an industrial age.
III · Lost Worlds · −140 Ma · Cretaceous
Britain beneath tropical seas.
Warm carbonate platforms covered what is now northern Europe. Ammonites drifted in surface currents above coral biostromes. The chalk bones of modern cities settled here, one microscopic plankton at a time.
IV · The Forest Before Europe · −60 Ma · Paleocene
A continuous canopy, pole to pole.
After the asteroid, ferns rose first, then forests. Subtropical woodland reached the Arctic Circle. Crocodilians basked at 70° N. The temperate world we know is the cooled remnant of this green planet.
V · The Last Great Ice · −21 ka · Last Glacial Maximum
A continent under a kilometre of ice.
Continental ice sheets advanced to 50° latitude. Sea level fell one hundred and twenty metres. The North Sea was dry tundra walked by mammoth; the first human migrations followed corridors of melt.
VI · Industrial Transformation · 1750 → 1990
The atmosphere is rewritten in two centuries.
Atmospheric CO₂ rises from 280 to 350 parts per million. Soils acidify across coal corridors. Pollinator diversity halves in the most industrial latitudes. The Holocene quietly ends.
VII · The Future Earth · 2080 → 2150
A planet still composing itself.
Mediterranean climate envelopes extend to 55° N. Arctic shipping lanes become seasonal. Coral biomes retreat to cooler, deeper water. Forests migrate north at 1.4 kilometres a year. The future is neither inevitable nor accidental.
VIII · Your Location Through Time
This place existed long before you.
Place
−140 Ma
Tropical carbonate platform
London · Ammonite shoals above coral biostromes. Air ≈ 26 °C.
−21 ka
Continental ice sheet
London · 1.2 km of ice. Mammoth steppe extends to the horizon.
−6 ka
Mesolithic woodland
London · Mixed oak, lime and hazel. Hunter-gatherer camps along clear river channels.
1850
Industrial expansion
London · Coal Measures shale quarried. Air SO₂ peaks. Soil pH drops to 5.8.
Today
Post-industrial mosaic
London · Urban heat island +2.1 °C. Pollinator activity drifting north at 1.4 km/y.
2080
Mediterranean envelope arrives
London · Frost windows close. Sea level +0.6 m at the estuary.
Coda
Landscapes remember. Ecosystems leave traces. The Earth holds every version of itself open, all at once.