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Colophon

About

A ray-traced relief map of every country — rendered from open elevation data, not drawn. Warm land, teal seas with real bathymetry, white vector borders. A terrella — a "little Earth" — is the model globe early scientists spun to study the whole planet at once; this is a modern one.

Sea floorCoastPeak

How it's made

  1. 1

    Fusion

    Copernicus GLO-30 land elevation is fused with GEBCO bathymetry into one seamless heightfield — the sea floor is part of the picture, so shelves and trenches read as terrain.

  2. 2

    Render

    The heightfield drives displacement in Blender's Cycles renderer, lit by a low sun for long relief shadows and coloured by elevation- and depth-keyed ramps.

  3. 3

    Borders

    Natural Earth boundaries composite on top as crisp vector lines — never baked into the terrain, so they stay sharp and toggle on demand.

  4. 4

    Snow

    A permanent snow / ice mask from ESA WorldCover whitens glaciers and ice caps.

  5. 5

    Sea ice

    At the poles, translucent white sea ice floats over the real ocean-floor relief — soft where the ice is seasonal, solid over the permanent pack. It's a 1991–2020 average of how often each stretch of sea freezes, not a live snapshot.

Data & licenses

Copernicus DEM GLO-30

Land elevation

Copernicus

Contains modified Copernicus DEM data (WorldDEM-30, © DLR e.V. and © Airbus Defence and Space; provided under COPERNICUS by the European Union and ESA).

GEBCO 2026 Grid

Bathymetry

Public domain

Reproduced from the GEBCO_2026 Grid, GEBCO Compilation Group (2026).

GLOBathy

Lake depth

CC0

GLOBathy global lakes bathymetry (Khazaei et al., Sci Data 9:36, 2022). Public-domain dedication (CC0); depth is modelled — see the Lake depth note below.

ESA WorldCover 2021

Snow / ice mask

CC-BY 4.0

© ESA WorldCover project 2021 / Contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2021), processed by the ESA WorldCover consortium.

NSIDC-0791 Snow Persistence

Snow persistence

NSIDC

MODIS snow-persistence climatology (water years 2001–2023), NASA NSIDC DAAC dataset NSIDC-0791.

RGI 7.0 Glaciers

Glaciers

CC-BY 4.0

Randolph Glacier Inventory 7.0 (RGI Consortium, 2023), NSIDC-0770 v7. Antarctic region 19 excluded.

OSI SAF Sea Ice (OSI-450-a)

Sea ice

EUMETSAT

EUMETSAT Ocean and Sea Ice SAF — Global Sea Ice Concentration Climate Data Record (OSI-450-a), reduced to a 1991–2020 frequency climatology. Copyright EUMETSAT.

Natural Earth

Borders & coastlines

Public domain

naturalearthdata.com.

Using this work

Imagery is CC BY-NC 4.0 — personal and educational use with attribution, commercial use reserved. Code is MIT.

The data keeps its own licenses, listed above. They travel with whatever you make from this.

Boundaries

Borders use Natural Earth's de-facto worldview everywhere; disputed lines are dashed. A cartographic default, not a political statement — and consistency matters more than any single call, so Kashmir keeps its shape whether you arrive from India or Pakistan.

It also produces results that look like bugs. Highlight Kazakhstan and a hole opens mid-country: the Baikonur Cosmodrome, leased to Russia. De-facto follows who administers the ground.

Lake depth

Lake beds are modelled, not surveyed. All 1.43 million of GLOBathy's lakes get the same synthetic cone, deepening from the shore. Against the Caspian's real soundings that model correlates about 0.53, and only 0.8% of lakes here have a measured depth at all.

Modelling them all alike is deliberate: showing only surveyed lakes would draw survey funding as geology, since ~85% of them sit in the USA.

Tools & technique

Rendering
Blender — Cycles, OptiX, OpenImageDenoise
Geoprocessing
GDAL, rasterio, WhiteboxTools
Web
MapLibre GL JS, PMTiles
Technique
Shaded relief after Daniel Huffman; aesthetic after Frank Ramspott