A view of Gaia as a braided cord. An attempt to map carbon transfer between every species that has ever existed on Earth (or rather, every species we believe to have existed): 2.7 million species, intertwined with the carbon footprints of the 441 largest human companies, the newest strands in Gaia's braid.
Every strand is a family of living things. Its thickness is the carbon it moves. At the very end, one branch pulls away.
Carbon moves. Plankton fix it, krill eat the plankton, whales eat the krill, bacteria eat the whale, and so on around the planet, every family of living things tied to every other by a meal. I wanted to see that web as one object, through all of time. This is it.
For most of history it braids. Islands surface (a continent on its own, a sub-ecosystem trading mostly with itself) and rejoin. Extinctions thin it and it regrows from whoever survived.
Then, around 1700, one species starts routing its carbon through companies. Farms, fisheries, oil wells, shipping lines, supermarkets: a branch that draws from the web but trades with itself. It is still a small share of the planet's carbon. It is also the first part of the web to leave rather than braid in. The rest of the cord thins as it grows.
Honesty first: nobody weighed the Permian. The cord is anchored to measurements wherever they exist and filled in with stated rules where they don't. In the explorer, switch the colour to evidence and every strand lights up by how much of its carbon rests on a measurement.
Every modelled number carries an uncertainty tier and the rule that made it; the explorer's book-keeping drawer shows the source behind any strand or link.
Orbit it, scrub through time, click a family, open its species. Works on a phone; a big screen does the family level more justice.
Open the explorer →