Four billion years of life, drawn as one cord of carbon exchange. Every strand is a family of living things. Its thickness is the carbon the family moves. The braid is who feeds whom.
For most of its history Gaia has been one web. Carbon fixed by plankton and plants passes through grazers, predators, parasites, fungi and microbes, and the web ties every part of the planet to every other. Islands surface now and then: a sub-ecosystem that trades mostly with itself, a continent on its own for a while. They always rejoin.
The five great extinctions cut the cord thin. Each time it regrew, braided from whatever lineages survived.
Then one species started to organise its carbon exchange through companies. Farms, fisheries, mines, oil wells, factories, shipping lines and supermarkets form a branch that draws from the web but trades mostly within itself. The dark branch is that economy. It is still a small share of Gaia's carbon throughput, but it is the first part of the web in four billion years to pull away rather than braid in, and the wild cord grows thinner as it grows.
The cord has 267 time steps, each a slice of the web: a step per 100 million years in the Precambrian, every geological stage from the Cambrian on, then millennia, centuries, decades and, from 1950, single years. Every family of life known from fossils or living today is a strand, placed next to the families it exchanges carbon with. Organisations join the web in the 1700s as strands of their own.
What is measured: the taxonomy and fossil ranges (GBIF, Open Tree of Life, Paleobiology Database), living biomass censuses, body masses and diets, documented species extinctions (IUCN), land use and population since 10,000 BCE (HYDE), fisheries, livestock and crops (FAO), whale catches, and company emissions (Carbon Majors, company reports). What is modelled: abundances in deep time, the fluxes between families, the shape of each extinction pulse and the regrowth after it. Every modelled number is labelled as an estimate in the explorer, with its uncertainty tier and the source it leans on.
Treat the picture as a defensible sketch, not a measurement. The cord is anchored to real data wherever such data exist, and interpolated with stated rules where they do not.
The explorer lets you orbit the cord, move through every time step, pick a strand, switch from kingdoms down to families, and open the species of any family with their body masses, diets and sources. It works on phones too, though a large screen does the family level more justice.
Open the explorer →