Credits & licences

Metriq PRISM Laboratory, a research lab of Metriq Foundation.

Earth imagery

Land and water: Natural Earth 1:10m land, Antarctic ice shelves and large lakes (public domain), drawn into a land mask at 4096 × 2048 and 2048 × 1024. The far view shows no clouds or sea ice.

Night image: Solar System Scope, Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International. Via three.js r180, whose example explicitly credits the textures. Resized and recompressed from earth_night_4096.jpg to 2K and 4K WebP. Lighting and color grading are applied in the renderer. City lights are a static composite, not current power availability.

Satellite tiles and coastlines

NASA GIBS VIIRS NOAA-20 Corrected Reflectance True Color, public domain. GIBS access documentation. Tiles use the previous UTC date, which can have gaps in coverage.

EOxCloudless https://cloudless.eox.at by EOX IT Services GmbH (Contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data 2016). CC BY 4.0; 2016 terms and attribution. This is a historical, cloudless basemap. Tiles are reprojected onto a sphere; the public endpoint has no uptime guarantee.

Natural Earth 1:110m and 1:10m coastlines and 1:10m admin-1 regions, public domain. Coastline coordinates are rounded to 5 decimal places and split into geographic sections for lazy loading. Region boundaries are simplified to 0.035° and rounded to 3 decimals for a compact place-name lookup. They are approximate; offshore matches are labeled “Near”.

Data

• NASA EONET: open storms, volcanoes, icebergs, floods and dust events. Dates refer to the latest geometry in the open event record, which can predate recent activity.
• Open-Meteo: weather and modeled air quality, CC BY 4.0. Model estimates can differ from local monitors. Weather refresh: 10 min; air: 12 min.
• NASA FIRMS: NOAA-20 and NOAA-21 VIIRS thermal detections, public data. We acknowledge NASA LANCE / FIRMS, operated by NASA ESDIS with funding from NASA Headquarters. Regional cache: 20 min; global NOAA-20 feed: 30 min. Detections are not confirmed wildfires.
• US National Weather Service: official US alerts, public domain. Cache: 5 min.
• USGS: past-day earthquakes, public domain. Cache: 20 min.
• NOAA Coral Reef Watch: v3.1 virtual stations and degree heating weeks, public domain. Station status (from Coral Reef Watch’s own station file) and the 5 km degree heating weeks grid (via the PacIOOS ERDDAP) update daily. Heat stress does not confirm bleaching.
• Hansen / UMD / Google / USGS / NASA Global Forest Change v1.13: annual tree cover loss, 2001–2025, CC BY 4.0. Aggregated to half-degree cells in the supplied project data. Tree cover loss does not identify its cause.
• Global Forest Watch integrated deforestation alerts (UMD GLAD-L and GLAD-S2, Wageningen University RADD), CC BY 4.0: shown live over the forest layer when you zoom in, past 90 days, updated daily.
• NOAA GFS via UCAR THREDDS: 250 hPa wind from the latest 1° analysis, public domain. Flow lines are traced in your browser; a model analysis, not an observation. Refresh: every 3 h.
• NOAA CoastWatch: blended near-real-time geostrophic surface currents from altimetry, free to use and redistribute. Sentinel data courtesy of the Copernicus Program; generated using AVISO+ products. Daily, about two days behind.
• Global Fishing Watch: AIS off events. Events come from the Global Fishing Watch API under CC BY-NC 4.0, powered by Global Fishing Watch. All activity is apparent, not certain, and a gap is not proof of wrongdoing.
• Flanders Marine Institute, MarineRegions.org: Maritime Boundaries v12 (EEZ polygons and boundary lines), CC BY 4.0, consulted 2026-11-11. Used only to describe where a gap began or ended; the boundaries have no legal value.

Sound

Piano notes from Meta Open Sound, Meta Piano, CC0 1.0. The music is generated in your browser from the live readings.

Software & type

three.js r180 and OrbitControls · MIT licence.
Inter by Rasmus Andersson · SIL Open Font License 1.1.

Procedural stars, atmosphere and locator effects are decorative. The terminator follows the current UTC solar position. This page is for awareness and exploration; consult official sources for decisions.