Deep Time · 4,600,000,000 years
EON — the whole history of Earth on one scrubbable, logarithmic line
The whole history of Earth on a single line. Scrub it, zoom it — the axis is logarithmic, so the deeper past compresses and the recent world opens up. Somewhere near the right edge, in a space thinner than a hair, is all of us.
Why the line bends the past.
Draw 4.6 billion years to a fair, even scale and the story is unreadable: the Cambrian explosion, the dinosaurs, every civilisation you have ever heard of pile into the last rung and vanish. The eye can hold a range of maybe a thousand to one — deep time runs to a billion to one.
So this axis is logarithmic. Each step to the left is another factor of ten: a thousand years, then ten thousand, a hundred thousand, a million, on to the whole age of the planet. Recent time gets the room it deserves; the long, slow Precambrian folds into a corner. As you zoom, the era names morph from condensed and faint to broad and heavy — a single variable typeface stretching to fit the span it labels.
The Phanerozoic — every animal you could name, trilobite to whale — is the thin gold band on the right.
Recorded human history, some five thousand years, is narrower than a single pixel. You have to zoom the logarithmic axis roughly a million-fold to make it wide enough to read.
The Big Five — mass extinctions marked as scars