TerraShift: What does +2°C (or -20°C) look like on Earth?
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I built an interactive 3D globe to visualize climate change. Drag a temperature slider from -40°C to +40°C, set a timeframe (10 to 10,000 years), and watch sea levels rise, ice sheets melt, vegetation shift, and coastlines flood... per-pixel from real elevation and satellite data.Click anywhere on the globe to see projected snowfall changes for that location.---I'm an amateur weather nerd who spends a lot of time on caltopo.com and windy.com tracking snow/ice conditions. I wanted to build something fun to imagine where I could go ski during an ice age.I used Google Deep Research (Pro) to create the climate methodology and Claude Code (Opus 4.6 - High) to create the site.The code: https://github.com/travistruett/terrashiftThe models aren't proper climate simulations, they're simplified approximations tuned for "does this look right?" but more nuanced than I expected them to be. The full methodology is documented here if anyone wants to poke holes in it.https://github.com/travistruett/terrashift/blob/main/docs/al...
HN · launched Mar 17, 2026 · 5 upvotes (top 89%) · 0 views
Niche: interactive 3d web simulations · 157 launches, 9 in the last 7 days ▼ -47% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Energy & climate
- Analytics & BI
- B2C
- Not AI
- Hobby / open-source project
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 157 launches in interactive 3d web simulations →
Could you build this?
Partial While the front-end Three.js/WebGL globe and UI controls can be vibe-coded, generating and streaming accurate per-pixel elevation, ice sheet, and climate simulation models across millennia requires geospatial data engineering.
What it would actually take: The stack requires a high-performance WebGL/WebGPU tile-rendering pipeline (like Cesium or deck.gl) fed by pre-processed digital elevation models (DEMs) and satellite raster datasets (such as Copernicus or NASA Earth data). The challenging part is processing multi-gigabyte raster datasets to model hydraulic sea level rise and biomic shifts efficiently enough to render at 60 FPS in browser shaders. This demands GIS data engineering expertise and specialized shader programming.
Discussion
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Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 243 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #238 of 244 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 119 days after the earliest competitor.
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