Younger gently dipping red sandstone overlies steep grey beds at Siccar Point, Scotland.

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Preparing the 3D view

Preparing lighting and the first complete frame…

Model scale

Equal distance along the coil = equal time. window 4540 Ma to present.

HadeanArchaeanProterozoicPalaeozoicMesozoicCenozoic

Proterozoic · 2043.000 Ma before present. One turn spans 1513.33 million years.

How to read these results

Pale collars mark era/eon boundaries at their actual proportional positions. ICS boundaries: 2026/06 edition. Phanerozoic begins at 538.8 Ma; its eras have very different durations. Select a shorter window to inspect recent time. The coil is a time axis, not strata thickness or an evolutionary ladder.

Geologic time

Read dates in millions of years and compare the unequal durations of major intervals in Earth’s history.

Drag to rotate. Hold Ctrl and scroll to zoom, or pinch on a touch screen.

Why it happens

Earth’s history spans about 4.54 billion years. Placing events on a proportional timeline shows how recent human history is and why a short interval near the present can hide much older events.

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Siccar Point: Devonian sandstone overlies much older, tilted Silurian beds. The unconformity records deformation, erosion and missing time.

Try a comparison

Move towards the present, then enlarge Phanerozoic or Quaternary time.

Reading the result

The timeline is a scale for comparing ages; event dates have different uncertainties and should not all be read as equally precise.

A common misunderstanding

The Grand Canyon is as old as the rocks exposed in its walls.

The rocks formed before erosion exposed them in the canyon. Rock formation, deformation, uplift and river incision belong to different parts of the geological history and require different evidence to date. An old rock can therefore form the wall of a much younger landform.

Cases

Exam language

A million years. Often used for geological ages, such as 66 Ma; Myr commonly denotes a duration of a million years.

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The unconformity at Siccar Point records a gap of many millions of years. Ma means million years ago and ka means thousand years ago; those intervals are inferred from geological evidence, not from the photograph alone.

A thousand years. Used with an age reference to express geological dates, for example 20 ka before present.

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The volcanic host of this Peridot Mesa xenolith is described by its source as about 580 ka old: roughly 580,000 years. This dates the host eruption, not the formation of the older mantle fragment.

Deep time

The immense timespan of geological history, extending back about 4.54 billion years to Earth's formation.

Pangaea

A supercontinent assembled during the late Palaeozoic and broken apart during the Mesozoic. Its reconstruction uses evidence from rocks, fossils, magnetism and continental margins. Pangaea was one of several supercontinents in Earth’s history, rather than Earth’s original crust.

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Permian Glossopteris leaf from Antarctica. Related fossils on separated southern continents are evidence that these lands were once joined within Gondwana, which formed part of Pangaea.

Cambrian

The earliest period of the Palaeozoic Era, beginning about 539 million years ago; its rocks record a major diversification of animal life.

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Ogyopsis klotzi from the Middle Cambrian Mount Stephen Trilobite Beds, Canada. Fossils help correlate and interpret ancient sedimentary rocks.

K–Pg

The Cretaceous–Palaeogene boundary, about 66 million years ago, marking a major mass extinction associated with the Chicxulub impact and wider environmental change.

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The K–Pg boundary in the Scollard Formation, Alberta, Canada. The rock record preserves evidence of the transition around 66 million years ago.

Log spiral

A spiral whose radius grows exponentially with angle. A geological-time display can use such a layout, but its labels must state how time is mapped to distance.

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Aqua MODIS observed Cyclone Evan near Fiji on 16 December 2012. Its cloud bands spiral around the centre; a mathematical logarithmic spiral is an approximation, not a measured exact fit.

Precambrian

The informal span of Earth history before the Cambrian Period, covering the Hadean, Archaean and Proterozoic eons.

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Layered rocks at Grand Canyon record the geological carbon cycle and deep time. Lithification converts sediment into rock; the canyon also exposes much older basement in its inner gorge. A landscape photograph alone does not date individual beds.

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Time windowOldest → present0.550