Planet Earth
Spin it, zoom in, and tap anywhere to find out what's there. Pick a view to see rain, heat, mountains, cities, farms and more.
33 ways to look at the planet
How it looks
From space
This is what Earth looks like from space, with the clouds taken away. Green is forest and grass, brown and yellow is desert, white is snow and ice. Slide the months and watch the snow come and go!
At night
Earth at night, seen from space. Every bright spot is lights: cities, towns and roads. Dark places have very few people, like deserts, jungles, oceans and the far north.
Land shapes
A map coloured by how high the land is, like the maps in an atlas: green lowlands, yellow and brown hills, white mountain tops. The shadows show the shapes of the mountains.
Up and down
How high
How high the land is above the sea. The tallest places are purple and white. Most people live on low land near the sea, where it is warmer and flatter.
Hills & climbs
How much you'd climb up and down if you walked across each place (about 20 km). Flat places are pale. Bright red places have huge climbs: mountains and deep canyons.
Weather and climate
Temperature
How warm or cold the air usually is in this month, day and night together. Press play and watch the warm colours swing north in June and south in December as Earth goes round the Sun.
Rain & snow
How much rain (and snow, melted) falls in this month. Pale yellow places are dry deserts. Deep blue and purple places get soaked. Watch the rains move with the seasons!
Rainy days
How many days in this month get at least a little rain. Some places get a few huge storms; others get a drizzle almost every day. (Land only.)
Sunshine
How much of the daytime the Sun is out, not hidden by clouds. Deserts are the sunniest places on Earth. (Land only.)
Wind
How fast the wind usually blows near the ground. The arrows show which way. Over the open ocean the wind is much stronger than over land, because there is nothing to slow it down.
Sticky air
How much water is in the air (humidity). Damp air feels sticky and muggy. Dry air feels crisp, and puddles disappear fast. (Land only.)
Frosty days
How many days in this month the ground freezes overnight. Purple places freeze every single night. Press play and watch the frost march south in winter. (Land only.)
Day vs night
How much warmer the afternoon is than the night. In deserts, a baking hot day can turn into a freezing night. Near the sea, days and nights are almost the same. (Land only.)
Climate zones
Every place has a usual weather pattern called its climate. Scientists sort them into zones: tropical (hot), dry (desert), mild, cold (snowy winters) and polar (icy). Places far apart can have the same climate!
Nature
Biomes
A biome is a big kind of home for plants and animals: rainforest, desert, grassland, tundra and more. Each has its own animals: monkeys in the rainforest, camels in the desert, reindeer on the tundra.
Wild places
The planet split into 846 wild regions, each with its own mix of plants and animals. Tap anywhere to find out the name of the wild place you're on.
What covers the land
What you'd see if you stood on the ground: forest, grass, bushes, farm fields, towns, bare sand and rock, snow, or wetlands. Measured by satellites in 2021.
Forests
How much of the land is covered by trees. The darkest green places are thick forest. Forests make oxygen, hold rain, and are home to more than half of all land animals.
People and places
Farms
Where people grow crops: wheat, rice, corn, soybeans and vegetables. Bright orange places are almost all farm fields. Most of the food you eat was grown in one of these places!
Cities, towns & countryside
Where are the cities, the towns, the villages, and the quiet countryside? Slide the years from 1975 to 2030 and watch cities grow!
How many people
How crowded each place is: how many people live in each square kilometre (a square you could walk across in about 12 minutes). Over 8 billion people live on Earth, but most of the land is nearly empty!
Countries
There are about 195 countries in the world. Each colour is a different country, and neighbours never share a colour. Tap one to see its flag, capital, and how many people live there.
Continents
Earth's land is split into seven continents: Asia, Africa, North America, South America, Antarctica, Europe and Australia (Oceania). Asia is the biggest; Australia is the smallest.
States & provinces
Countries are split into smaller parts: states in the USA, Australia and India, provinces in Canada and China, regions and counties in other places. Tap any one to find its name.
People per country
How many people live in each country. India and China each have more than 1.4 billion people. Some island countries have fewer people than a small town!
Country sizes
How big each country is. Russia is nearly twice as big as the next biggest, Canada. Careful: flat maps make places near the poles look bigger than they really are. The globe shows the true sizes!
Time zones
When it's lunchtime in one place, it's the middle of the night somewhere else! The world is split into time zones so noon happens around when the Sun is highest. Tap anywhere to see what time it is there right now.
Moving Earth
Tectonic plates
Earth's outside is cracked into giant pieces called plates, like a cracked eggshell. They move about as fast as your fingernails grow. Where they push, pull or slide past each other, you get earthquakes, volcanoes and mountains.
Earthquakes
Every big earthquake since 1990 (magnitude 6 or more). See how they line up along the edges of the plates? Earthquakes happen when plates get stuck, then suddenly slip.
Volcanoes
Volcanoes that have erupted in the last 10,000 years. Red ones have erupted since 1964. Most are on the edges of plates, and many are hidden under the sea!
Drifting continents
Go back 300 million years! Back then almost all the land was squeezed into one giant supercontinent, Pangaea. Press play and watch it crack apart and drift into the world we know. Each colour is a continent as it is today, so you can follow Africa, India or your own country.
Oceans
Ocean floor
We pulled the plug and drained the oceans! Now you can see the bottom of the sea: underwater mountain ranges, flat plains and deep trenches. The darker the blue, the deeper.
Sea temperature
How warm the top of the sea is in this month. Warm water is where coral reefs grow and hurricanes get their power. See the warm Gulf Stream reaching up towards Europe!
Put on top of any view
Names
Countries, seas, deserts and mountain ranges.
Borders
The lines between countries. You can't see them from space: people agreed on them.
States
States, provinces and regions inside each country.
Rivers & lakes
The big rivers and lakes. Rivers always run downhill to the sea or a lake.
Cities
Big cities. A star is a country's capital.
Mountains
Famous peaks with how tall they are.
Lines
The equator, the tropics, the Arctic and Antarctic circles, and the prime meridian.
Clouds
Clouds from one real day seen from space.
Day & night
Where the Sun is shining right now, and where it is night.
Winds
How the wind usually blows near the ground in this month.
Currents
Big rivers inside the ocean. Red ones carry warm water, blue ones cold.
Plate edges
Where the giant pieces of Earth's crust meet.
Earthquakes
Big earthquakes since 1990. Bigger circles were stronger.
Volcanoes
Volcanoes that have erupted in the last 10,000 years.
Record-breakers
- Highest mountain. Mount Everest, 8,849 m (29,032 feet) high. Its top is in the sky where jets fly, and the air there has only a third of the oxygen at the beach.
- Deepest ocean. The Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench is about 10,935 m down. If you dropped Mount Everest in, its top would still be 2 km under water.
- Hottest place. Death Valley in California reached 56.7°C (134°F) in 1913, the hottest air temperature ever measured.
- Coldest place. Vostok Station in Antarctica got down to −89.2°C (−128.6°F) in 1983. That's more than four times colder than a freezer.
- Driest place. Parts of the Atacama Desert in Chile have gone years without a single drop of rain. Scientists test Mars rovers there.
- Wettest place. Mawsynram in India gets about 11.9 m (39 feet) of rain a year, enough to cover a three-storey house.
- Longest river. The Nile flows about 6,650 km north through Africa to the Mediterranean Sea. Ancient Egypt grew up along its banks.
- Biggest river. The Amazon carries more water than the next seven biggest rivers put together, through the biggest rainforest on Earth.
- Biggest hot desert. The Sahara is about as big as the whole United States. Thousands of years ago it was green, with lakes and hippos!
- Biggest desert of all. Antarctica counts as a desert because so little snow falls there. Its ice is almost 5 km thick in places.
- Deepest lake. Lake Baikal in Russia is 1,642 m deep and holds about a fifth of all the fresh lake and river water on Earth.
- Biggest lake. The Caspian Sea is so big it's called a sea, but it's really a salty lake with no way out to the ocean.
- Famous canyon. The Grand Canyon is up to 1.8 km deep. The Colorado River carved it over millions of years.
- Biggest coral reef. The Great Barrier Reef is so big you can see it from space. It's built by tiny animals called corals.
- Tallest waterfall. Angel Falls in Venezuela drops 979 m. The water falls so far that much of it turns to mist before it lands.
- Biggest city. About 37 million people live in and around Tokyo, more than in the whole of Canada.
- Lowest land. The shore of the Dead Sea is about 430 m below sea level. The water is so salty you float like a cork.
- Biggest island. Greenland is the biggest island in the world, and most of it is covered by a sheet of ice up to 3 km thick.
- Biggest volcano. Mauna Loa in Hawaii is the biggest active volcano on Earth. Measured from the sea floor, its neighbour Mauna Kea is taller than Everest.
- Ring of Fire. Three out of four of the world's volcanoes, and most big earthquakes, are in a giant horseshoe round the Pacific Ocean.
- Supercontinent. 250 million years ago almost all the land was one giant supercontinent, Pangaea. You could have walked from Antarctica to Alaska!
- North Pole. There's no land at the North Pole, just floating sea ice on top of an ocean about 4 km deep.
- South Pole. The South Pole is on top of Antarctica's ice, 2,835 m above sea level. Every direction from it is north!
- Las Vegas. Las Vegas is a big city in the Mojave Desert. It gets only about 10 cm (4 inches) of rain a year.
Where the maps come from
Every map is real science data, made smaller so it fits in a web page. Numbers are averages, rounded so they are easy to read.
- Pictures from space, every month: NASA Earth Observatory, Blue Marble Next Generation (Reto Stöckli) (Public domain).
- Earth at night: NASA Earth Observatory, Black Marble 2016 (Public domain).
- Height of the land and depth of the sea: NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information, ETOPO 2022 (Public domain).
- Temperature, rain, rainy days, sunshine, wind, humidity, frost and day-night swing on land: Climatic Research Unit, University of East Anglia: CRU CL 2.0 (New, Lister, Hulme and Makin, 2002) (Free to use with credit).
- Temperature, rain and wind over the sea, and the moving winds: NOAA Physical Sciences Laboratory: NCEP/NCAR Reanalysis and GPCP v2.3, 1991–2020 averages (Public domain).
- Sea temperature: NOAA OI SST v2, 1991–2020 averages (Public domain).
- Climate zones: Beck, Zimmermann, McVicar, Vergopolan, Berg and Wood (2018), Köppen-Geiger maps at 1 km (CC BY 4.0).
- Biomes and wild places: RESOLVE Ecoregions 2017 (Dinerstein et al.) (CC BY 4.0).
- What covers the land, forests and farms: ESA WorldCover 2021 v200 (Zanaga et al.) (CC BY 4.0).
- Cities, towns and countryside; how many people: European Commission Joint Research Centre, Global Human Settlement Layer R2023A (GHS-SMOD, GHS-POP) (CC BY 4.0).
- Countries, states, rivers, lakes, names and time zones: Natural Earth (Public domain).
- Tectonic plates: Peter Bird (2003), PB2002, as GeoJSON by Hugo Ahlenius (ODC-By 1.0).
- Earthquakes: US Geological Survey earthquake catalogue (Public domain).
- Volcanoes: NOAA NCEI Volcano Location Database (Public domain).
- Drifting continents and ancient plate edges: Merdith et al. (2021), Extending full-plate tectonic models into deep time, via the GPlates Web Service (EarthByte, University of Sydney) (CC BY 4.0).
- Clouds: NASA Earth Observatory, Blue Marble clouds (Public domain).