GEOLOGY · LANDSCAPE · TIME
Switch between hundreds of millions and tens of thousands of years. Each marker keeps its source’s range and precision and opens the project that documents it.
Choose a trace. See its age, range and the project that documents it.
LONG VIEW
The linear axis starts at 541 Ma as a display limit. The current base of the Cambrian and Phanerozoic is 538.8 ± 0.6 Ma; 541 Ma is not the formal boundary.
GEOLOGICAL SCALE · MILLION YEARS
The project places Hațeg Island in the Late Cretaceous, 70 million years ago.
Project in the collection
Seventy million years ago Hațeg was an island. A fully grown long-necked dinosaur there weighed under a tonne, and a reptile with 10–12 metre wings flew overhead. Stand next to them, to scale, and see on the map where the bones came from.
RECENT DETAIL
A separate scale in thousands of years. It does not continue the million-year axis visually; comparisons between scales are in the labels, not point positions.
RECENT SCALE · THOUSANDS OF YEARS
The project dates the gradual flooding of the North Sea landscape between 10,000 and 7,000 years ago.
Project in the collection
Doggerland joined Britain to Denmark and the Netherlands until the sea drowned it. A relief map of today’s sea floor, with 1,873 river channels, lakes and other features mapped beneath it, and the computed shore of any moment since 16,000 years ago. For each North Sea town, it shows how far away the shore was 10,500 years ago.
GEOLOGICAL TIME BOUNDARIES
These intervals provide context. The event scales above begin separately; they do not compress billions of years into one chart.
The Hadean begins at a GSSA of 4,567.3 ± 0.16 Ma, dated from CAIs in primitive meteorites. It marks the age of the Solar System and the start of planet formation, not a direct measurement of Earth’s age.
From about 4.031 to 2.500 billion years ago. The selected collection has no dated local event from this eon.
From 2.500 billion to 538.8 million years ago. This interval is longer than the whole history of complex life visible in the fossil record.
The last 538.8 million years, divided into the Paleozoic, Mesozoic and Cenozoic. The events selected from projects occupy only part of this interval.
Project in the collection
Born some three hundred million years ago, before dinosaurs and before the Carpathians, 467 m today. Fly over the 3D relief, climb the eight peaks and rewind time: the Triassic sea, the Cretaceous sea, the emersion. In Romanian and English.
Project in the collection
Choose a Romanian place and compare the position of the ground beneath it in three published plate-reconstruction models. Differences between the models remain visible.
Project in the collection
Seventy million years ago Hațeg was an island. A fully grown long-necked dinosaur there weighed under a tonne, and a reptile with 10–12 metre wings flew overhead. Stand next to them, to scale, and see on the map where the bones came from.
Project in the collection
The impact of 66 million years ago on one clock, on the globe as it then was: the shaking, the fragments falling back from the crater, the wave, the years of dark. The rock beneath London was about 6,500 km from the impact; the first tremor reached it after 9 minutes 57 seconds. With the times for 8,771 towns and cities. In Romanian and English.
The 541 Ma axis is a display window, not the formal start of the Phanerozoic. A second axis enlarges the last 40,000 years for caves, ice and shorelines.
Project in the collection
Born some three hundred million years ago, before dinosaurs and before the Carpathians, 467 m today. Fly over the 3D relief, climb the eight peaks and rewind time: the Triassic sea, the Cretaceous sea, the emersion. In Romanian and English.
Project in the collection
Doggerland joined Britain to Denmark and the Netherlands until the sea drowned it. A relief map of today’s sea floor, with 1,873 river channels, lakes and other features mapped beneath it, and the computed shore of any moment since 16,000 years ago. For each North Sea town, it shows how far away the shore was 10,500 years ago.
Trovants do not grow at the rate repeated in folklore; Măcin and Ciomadul have different ages supported by different research. Open each project for the source and dating method.
Project in the collection
The round stones of Costești formed underground from sand glued by calcite, and they do not grow after rain: rain only washes the sand from around them. Grow a trovant in a slice of hillside, make it rain and see what changes. Nobody ever measured the “4–5 cm every 1,200 years”. English and Romanian.
Project in the collection
Ciomadul last erupted 27,000–32,000 years ago, and “extinct” only means 10,000 quiet years. Put the crater, the lake and your own town on one scale drawing, descend to the partly molten rock and see who says what about the volcano.
Project in the collection
Born some three hundred million years ago, before dinosaurs and before the Carpathians, 467 m today. Fly over the 3D relief, climb the eight peaks and rewind time: the Triassic sea, the Cretaceous sea, the emersion. In Romanian and English.
The landslide that formed Red Lake, the ice at Scărișoara and the waters that covered Doggerland are different processes. The timeline shows each source’s interval, not one shared cause.
Project in the collection
In the summer of 1837, a slope of Mount Ghilcoș slid across the Bicaz valley and created Red Lake, with its drowned fir forest. Replay the night of the slide on the real valley, in 3D, and weigh the evidence: the rains of 1837 or the earthquake of 1838? In Romanian and English.
Project in the collection
A 1980 guidebook popularised 3,500 years; the 2017 research puts the minimum age at about 10,500. Map, cold trap, chronology.
Project in the collection
Doggerland joined Britain to Denmark and the Netherlands until the sea drowned it. A relief map of today’s sea floor, with 1,873 river channels, lakes and other features mapped beneath it, and the computed shore of any moment since 16,000 years ago. For each North Sea town, it shows how far away the shore was 10,500 years ago.
Some projects give a rounded age, others a range or only a minimum age. The tool keeps those forms and does not turn an estimate into an exact date.
Project in the collection
The impact of 66 million years ago on one clock, on the globe as it then was: the shaking, the fragments falling back from the crater, the wave, the years of dark. The rock beneath London was about 6,500 km from the impact; the first tremor reached it after 9 minutes 57 seconds. With the times for 8,771 towns and cities. In Romanian and English.
Project in the collection
The remains of a man from about 40,000 years ago, found near Anina: 6–9% Neanderthal DNA from an ancestor 4–6 generations back. The Oase 1 genome, published in 2015.
Project in the collection
Ciomadul last erupted 27,000–32,000 years ago, and “extinct” only means 10,000 quiet years. Put the crater, the lake and your own town on one scale drawing, descend to the partly molten rock and see who says what about the volcano.
Project in the collection
A 1980 guidebook popularised 3,500 years; the 2017 research puts the minimum age at about 10,500. Map, cold trap, chronology.
Geology · 49 projects
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49 projects
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Rocks and landforms
Orșova, a town in southwestern Romania, stood at the Cerna’s mouth. A 2017 survey measured the Cerna Gulf to 24 metres deep; a study reports 5 to 6 metres of sediment over the old town site. These are different measurements. In Romanian and English.
Rocks and landforms
Landsat frames from 41 summers, 1984–2025: the distance from a fixed point to the tip of Sacalin Island grew from 6.99 to 10.74 km. In Romanian and English.
Rocks and landforms
41 annual satellite frames, one per summer, over the Dăbuleni sands of southern Romania. The green that stays has grown by 10,540 hectares, from 2,437 to 12,977 — and what never settled into lasting green is, almost everywhere, the water of the Danube.
Volcanoes and heat
On a slope in the Buzău Subcarpathians, Romania, gas seeps out of the ground and burns — 21.9–26.9 tonnes of methane a year, by two measurement campaigns. Drill 3,331 metres down after the gas, then set the flame beside your own home's use.
Terrain and measurement
Of 15 pairs, one: Costești-Cetățuie and Blidaru, neighbours 1.6 km apart. In the other 14 the mountain rises at least 100 m above the straight line. From the capital, Sarmizegetusa Regia, none of the other five fortresses can be seen, even from a 12 m tower. A chain of posts in between remains possible; the positions known do not show one.
Geological time
Each light is a Stone Age archaeological site with a radiocarbon date from that time. The ice, the coasts and the lights change as you scroll, from 27,000 years ago to 8,000. Search for your town to see what stood there 21,000 years ago.
Geological time
The impact of 66 million years ago on one clock, on the globe as it then was: the shaking, the fragments falling back from the crater, the wave, the years of dark. The rock beneath London was about 6,500 km from the impact; the first tremor reached it after 9 minutes 57 seconds. With the times for 8,771 towns and cities. In Romanian and English.
Geological time
Doggerland joined Britain to Denmark and the Netherlands until the sea drowned it. A relief map of today’s sea floor, with 1,873 river channels, lakes and other features mapped beneath it, and the computed shore of any moment since 16,000 years ago. For each North Sea town, it shows how far away the shore was 10,500 years ago.
Terrain and measurement
How high Kilimanjaro is, what it is made of, how much ice it has left and how people climb it: the 5,895 m mountain drawn to scale, with its three cones, seven routes and the ice left since 1912. In Romanian, English and Chinese.
Terrain and measurement
Japan's highest mountain, 3,776 m: its last eruption in 1707–08, Hokusai's print, the four trails and the 2026 climbing rules, with a clock that shows where sunrise finds you. In Romanian, English and Chinese.
Terrain and measurement
How high Everest is and what the height is measured from: the five published heights from 1856 to 2020 drawn to scale on the last metres of the summit, then the Nepal route, the Tibetan side, the river that lifts the mountain and the sea the metres are counted from. In Romanian, English and Chinese.
Earthquakes and moving ground
At 5:12 a.m. a foreshock; 20–25 seconds later, Mw 7.9 across 477 km of fault — then three days of fire. Disputed tolls, 478 or over 3,000 dead, the Schmitz handbill and the unbuilt Burnham plan. In Romanian and English.
Earthquakes and moving ground
05:20 local, Mw 7.10: Messina and Reggio Calabria within minutes, then the tsunami — 3 metres in town, 12–13 metres south of Pellaro. 80,000 estimated dead, the Russian sailors, the shelters and the seismic decree. In Romanian and English.
Geological time
On the shore of a lake in Niger, about 200 graves. Move the clock from 7700 BCE to today and watch the water, the animals and the people go, then watch the rain leave the Sahara on a map: it did not stop everywhere at once.
Geological time
Two lines of ice-age footprints in New Mexico, at least 1.5 km long, show someone small hurrying across slippery mud with a child probably under three, then walking back hours later. Carry the child along the trail, switch hips, set them down when they wriggle, then walk back over a mammoth’s and a giant sloth’s tracks.
Rocks and landforms
Six, seven and a half or eight kilometres of gorge, depending on how you measure. Fly over the real valley, in 3D, and see how the Bicaz river cut the mountain in two: four sectors, walls over three hundred metres, and an incision machine you drive with time. In Romanian and English.
Rocks and landforms
In the summer of 1837, a slope of Mount Ghilcoș slid across the Bicaz valley and created Red Lake, with its drowned fir forest. Replay the night of the slide on the real valley, in 3D, and weigh the evidence: the rains of 1837 or the earthquake of 1838? In Romanian and English.
Earthquakes and moving ground
Follow the 1977 wave across a 3D map of Bucharest, see the damage recorded for each square kilometre and search today's seismic-risk list. The historic record describes map squares, not what happened to any one building.
Rocks and landforms
Geamăna, in Romania's Apuseni Mountains, buried since 1978 by the Roșia Poieni copper mine's tailings pond: 48 Landsat photographs, one a year, and terrain measured from orbit show the valley filling up past the church roof. In Romanian and English.
Rocks and landforms
The round stones of Costești formed underground from sand glued by calcite, and they do not grow after rain: rain only washes the sand from around them. Grow a trovant in a slice of hillside, make it rain and see what changes. Nobody ever measured the “4–5 cm every 1,200 years”. English and Romanian.
Volcanoes and heat
299 sunsets painted between 1500 and 1900, laid side by side into a single sky. How red each one is was measured on the painting. See the sky catch fire after Laki, Tambora and Krakatau, where it doesn't fit, and why Munch's Scream was left out. In Romanian and English.
Rocks and landforms
The Roman wall, the Cathedral and Gaudí's houses used sandstone from Montjuïc, the hill by the port. The LiDAR relief in 3D, a Roman quarry possibly older than Barcino and, building by building, how the link is known. Under the microscope, two of six Roman carvings "in Montjuïc stone" were another rock. In Romanian, English, Spanish and Catalan.
Terrain and measurement
Type a town and see which peaks rise above its horizon and how far away they are. More than half of Romanians live where a peak over 2,000 m would be in view; from the Retezat you can see Bulgaria, from the Apuseni the Tatras.
Rocks and landforms
On 3 February 1882, after a fireball crossed the sky near Cluj, thousands of stones fell: small ones at one end, giants at the other. Watch them fall again on the map drawn at the time, and weigh the famous “56 kg stone” back into 102 stones. English and Romanian.
Volcanoes and heat
At Pâclele, cones a few metres high spit cold mud pushed by methane from 3,000 metres down. No magma, no lava. Stand beside a cone, to scale, and see where the ground really burns.
Caves and below ground
Males weighed 400–500 kilograms and stood, by one press summary, 1.7 metres at the shoulder, and their bones say they ate only plants. Stand next to them, to scale, and see what researchers found in Bears' Cave and three other Romanian caves.
Terrain and measurement
The top 50 metres hold oxygen. Below 100–150 metres there is none at all, and the oxygen-free water preserves wooden ships for thousands of years. Dive past the ships, down to 2,212 metres.
Geological time
Ciomadul last erupted 27,000–32,000 years ago, and “extinct” only means 10,000 quiet years. Put the crater, the lake and your own town on one scale drawing, descend to the partly molten rock and see who says what about the volcano.
Caves and below ground
Under a field near Mangalia, a cave with no natural entrance feeds 52 invertebrate species on sulfur and methane, sealed for 2.5 million years.
Earthquakes and moving ground
4 March 1977: the ground under Bucharest swayed once every second and a half, close to the beat of the tall interwar blocks. Shake a 1977 street, see the fallen blocks and look up your address on the official seismic-risk list.
Geological time
The remains of a man from about 40,000 years ago, found near Anina: 6–9% Neanderthal DNA from an ancestor 4–6 generations back. The Oase 1 genome, published in 2015.
Geological time
A 1980 guidebook popularised 3,500 years; the 2017 research puts the minimum age at about 10,500. Map, cold trap, chronology.
Geological time
Choose a Romanian place and compare the position of the ground beneath it in three published plate-reconstruction models. Differences between the models remain visible.
Geological time
Seventy million years ago Hațeg was an island. A fully grown long-necked dinosaur there weighed under a tonne, and a reptile with 10–12 metre wings flew overhead. Stand next to them, to scale, and see on the map where the bones came from.
Geological time
Drag the clock through the last 20,000 years: shoreline, glaciers, steppe and forest, a Danube without a delta, dated human sites and vanished megafauna, with your town pinned.
Earthquakes and moving ground
Romania's big earthquakes happen between 61 and 184 kilometres below Vrancea. On the map, Bucharest was 4.67 times farther from the 1977 epicentre than Focșani. Through the crust, 1.84 times.
Rocks and landforms
The Moon has 5,185 confirmed impact craters wider than 20 kilometres. Earth, despite taking more hits per square kilometre, has only 52. An explorer with 70 real craters, from 200 years old to 2.229 billion years old.
Caves and below ground
The Grind shaft leads the ranking by vertical range, at 815 metres. The map and cards track ten caves and shafts, their length, explorers and still-changing records.
Terrain and measurement
Interactive investigation of drinking water origins across Romania’s 10 major cities: surface reservoirs, karst aquifers, 100+ km aqueducts, hardness, and glass chemistry.
Caves and below ground
Three caves with official fares: Ialomita (30 lei, all year), Polovragi (20 lei, daily), Comarnic (35 lei, Apr–Oct, min group 5). Hours and measured drives.
Earthquakes and moving ground
The P–S window matters when the next action was decided beforehand.
Geological time
Pick your town and go down beneath it through a core of time: the stones that fell at Mociu, the Scărișoara ice, the cave bear, Ciomadul, the man from Oase, the Paratethys lake, the dinosaur island and where your ground lay 100 million years ago. Every layer, a page from the archive.
Rocks and landforms
Under the quiet valley at Roșia Montană lie four mines, one over another: 7 kilometres of Roman galleries with a trapezoid profile, the centuries of fire and gunpowder, the 400-metre communist quarry — and the pit that was never dug, stopped in the street and in Parliament, tried at Washington. Peel the mountain skin by skin, in schematic 3D.
Rocks and landforms
At the Cazane narrows the Danube squeezes to some 150 metres and digs some 53 deep: the Roman road with the plaque of year 100, the face of Decebalus carved in 1993–2004, and Ada Kaleh island with its 511 people, drowned by the dam. Raise the water from the Roman level to today's lake, in schematic 3D.
Rocks and landforms
The Bucegi Sphinx and Babele are erosion remnants in Albian conglomerate, not carvings. A 3D plateau, an erosion machine with a time scale, and five myths set beside the geology — from Ruzo and Cinamar to 28 November.
Rocks and landforms
Five thousand years ago this was a Black Sea bay. Fly over the fan, in 3D, and see how the Danube filled it lobe by lobe: three arms, four lobes, old shorelines and a time machine showing the growth — and its braking after the Iron Gates dams. In Romanian and English.
Geological time
Born some three hundred million years ago, before dinosaurs and before the Carpathians, 467 m today. Fly over the 3D relief, climb the eight peaks and rewind time: the Triassic sea, the Cretaceous sea, the emersion. In Romanian and English.
Earthquakes and moving ground
The ground under every Romanian town moves north-east at about 26 millimetres a year, carried by the Eurasian plate. Relative to the plate little remains, but south of the Carpathians the GPS stations drift coherently south. The station map and your town's number. In Romanian and English.
Geological time
18 documented places on Carpathian relief, from Hațeg fossils and Miocene salt to the Oase human and Dacian fortresses. Choose two points or towns to see the terrain between them and featured evidence within 30 km of the line.
This collection brings together relevant projects from the site’s library. Each entry has a title, a description and a link to its available edition. The complete projects carry their sources and evidence limits.
Reviewed · Collection as text
Current v2026/06, checked 16 October 2026. The Hadean begins at the 4,567.30 ± 0.16 Ma GSSA dated from meteoritic CAIs; the base of the Cambrian is 538.8 ± 0.6 Ma. Numerical ages can be revised.
A GSSP is a physical reference point in a rock section that defines the base of a stratigraphic unit.
The current chart gives 538.8 ± 0.6 Ma for the base of the Cambrian and the GSSA ages for the Precambrian.
