Today's cities on a globe of Earth's tectonic past and future
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HN · launched Aug 9, 2026 · 37 upvotes (top 17%) · 0 views
Niche: data and scientific visualization tools · 146 launches, 3 in the last 7 days ▼ -50% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Education
- Content generation
- B2C
- Not AI
- Hobby / open-source project
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 146 launches in data and scientific visualization tools →
Could you build this?
Partial The interactive WebGL/Three.js globe and time slider UI is straightforward to vibe code, but formatting and accurately interpolating the 1-billion-year Merdith 2021 paleogeographic plate tectonic datasets requires specialized geoscientific GIS processing.
What it would actually take: The frontend uses Three.js or Cesium.js with custom GLSL shaders to render spherical geometries and vector borders over time. The core challenge is processing GPlates geological reconstruction rotation files and continental polygon shapefiles into optimized temporal vector meshes or vertex animation textures. This requires specialized domain knowledge in paleogeology and GIS data pipeline tools like pyGPlates.
Discussion
10 comments analyzed.
Concerns raised: Future movement predictions cause unrealistic collisions and bouncing, Auto-rotate interferes with drag responsiveness, Extrapolated continental movements show inaccuracies (e.g., Baja peninsula moving through Alaska), Play button not functioning, Difficulty verifying accuracy of specific geological details like regional uplift
Feature requests: Add more cities beyond current limited selection, Ability to track specific geographic points from GPS coordinates or polygons, Faster playback speed to view full timeline, More precise coordinate system overlay for visualization
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 393 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #57 of 394 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 281 days after the earliest competitor.
- isometricworld · github · 2026-11-09 · 30 upvotes · similarity 0.51
- Strata · hn · 2026-07-09 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.50
- random-city · github · 2026-09-09 · 13 upvotes · similarity 0.49
- Future-Coast · github · 2026-09-10 · 22 upvotes · similarity 0.48
- amsterdam-by-building · github · 2026-10-12 · 14 upvotes · similarity 0.48
- Live Atlas · ph · 2026-10-14 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- Matthew Slack Perth Exploring the Future · ph · 2026-09-17 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- EarthCraft · github · 2026-10-12 · 10 upvotes · similarity 0.45
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