History is a place.
What Explore Earth is
A time machine for Earth. Pick a year, turn the globe, click anywhere, and see what was happening there — the polity that controlled the ground, the events nearby, the people alive at the time. Nothing requires an account.
Where the borders come from
Historical borders are drawn from historical-basemaps by André Ourednik (GPL-3.0): 49 world snapshots from 3000 BCE to 2010. From 2020 on, the map uses today’s countries from Natural Earth (public domain), which include South Sudan; years 2011–2019 still show the 2010 map. Between snapshots Explore Earth shows the most recent earlier snapshot and labels it (“Borders as of 1200”). It never interpolates or invents a border. When you scrub between snapshots, the maps cross-fade. The fade is a visual transition, not a claim about how the borders changed.
How uncertainty is shown
The source grades every border. Approximate borders are dashed. Documented and legally defined borders are solid. Dates carry an explicit qualifier (exact, ≈ approximate, uncertain, or disputed) and a plausible range. Where historians disagree, entries say so (“Historical interpretation varies”) and explain why. When a place has no events listed, Explore Earth says the dataset has no entry. That doesn’t mean nothing happened there.
Sources
Every entity cites at least one source, shown under “Sources” in its panel, with the date the source was accessed. The current seed dataset summarises encyclopaedic references (mostly Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0). The data model also supports academic, museum, archive and primary sources as the dataset grows. Base geography is from Natural Earth (public domain). Terrain relief is from Mapzen/AWS Terrain Tiles. Modern borders are shown for orientation only.
Data licences
historical-basemaps (GPL-3.0). The simplified border files Explore Earth serves are derived from it and remain under GPL-3.0. Entity summaries are derived from Wikipedia and are shared under CC BY-SA 4.0. Country facts come from mledoze/countries (ODbL 1.0) and the World Bank (CC BY 4.0). Population, urbanisation, GDP and life-expectancy layers come from Our World in Data (CC BY 4.0). Live weather, wind and sea data come from Open-Meteo (CC BY 4.0). Recent earthquakes come from the U.S. Geological Survey (public domain). Base geography is from Natural Earth (public domain). Terrain is from Mapzen/AWS Terrain Tiles, which are built from SRTM, GMTED2010, ETOPO1 and other public elevation datasets.
Privacy
No accounts, no cookies, no ads and no tracking. Explore Earth counts visits with GoatCounter, which records only anonymous totals (the page, the referring site, the browser and a rough country) and a few feature counts such as “a story was started”; it can’t tell who you are or follow you elsewhere. Your settings, lesson progress and daily-game streak are kept in your browser’s local storage and never leave your device. “Locate me” rounds your browser’s location to about 1 km before using it, and looks up what’s at that point like any other click. Live weather is fetched from Open-Meteo by the Explore Earth server on your behalf, so they never see your IP address. Like any website, the hosting provider keeps standard request logs. If Explore Earth is useful to you, you can support it on GitHub Sponsors.
Open source
Explore Earth is free software under the GNU AGPL-3.0. The code, the curated data and the build scripts are on GitHub. Corrections are very welcome: every entity panel has a link to report a mistake.
Periods are conventions
“Middle Ages” and “Late Antiquity” are labels historians use for particular regions. They aren’t universal facts. Explore Earth stores periods with a region and lets them overlap, so the Heian period and the European High Middle Ages can sit side by side.
Accessibility
Every control is keyboard-operable. The timeline is an ARIA slider: arrow keys move in small steps, Page Up/Down in large ones. Press / to search and space to play or pause. Map information never depends on colour alone, because line style and icons carry meaning too. Motion follows your system’s reduced-motion setting, and you can override it in Settings. The list view shows everything on the globe as ordinary lists, and it opens automatically if your browser can’t run WebGL.