Possible Earths is a small editorial gallery of counterfactual-geography scenarios. For each one, we move some piece of the planet — a desert, an ocean basin, a mountain range — and look at what changes when the climate model is allowed to respond.
The tool
The maps come from World Orogen, a browser-based procedural planet generator by R. Aguilar (GPL-3, source on GitHub). Orogen accepts a 2:1 equirectangular elevation PNG, runs tectonic, ocean, wind, and climate simulations on it, and exports satellite, Köppen, and temperature views. We pre-render the maps and host them here. Orogen is the tool — this site is just a gallery of its outputs.
What this is
- Short essays paired with before-and-after maps in four views.
- A consistent Köppen-Geiger legend so the climate maps are readable across scenarios.
- Downloadable input heightmaps so you can rerun any scenario yourself.
- Privacy-first: no analytics, no cookies, no third-party scripts.
What this is not
- A research tool. Orogen's own framing is the right one: the model is scientifically informed, not necessarily physically accurate. It uses heuristic climate physics, not a GCM.
- A source of climate projections. For actual projections of future Earth climate, see the Copernicus Climate Data Store and CMIP6.
- A peer-reviewed paleoclimate reconstruction. Where we visualize a past configuration like the African Humid Period or the Messinian, we cite the underlying paleoclimate literature — the maps are an Orogen rendering of that literature, not a substitute for it.
Credits
- R. Aguilar — World Orogen ( orogen.studio, GPL-3). Without it, none of this works.
- Red Blob Games — the procedural-mapgen articles whose algorithms inform Orogen upstream. redblobgames.com.
- NASA SRTM and Copernicus DEM — sources for the base equirectangular Earth heightmap when a real-Earth comparison is involved.
License
Site code is MIT. Essays and original images are CC BY 4.0. Modified heightmaps are derivatives of whatever source DEM was used and inherit that source's license.