28 / 2025-03-27 08:41:42

TimeScale Creator Online for Visualizing Earth History

Web-based Visualization,Geologic Time Scale,Biologic Events,Data Mining,Stratigraphy,Earth History

The TimeScale Creator Online (https://tsconline.timescalecreator.org/) is a free, public, web-based system designed to explore the intricate relationships of geological and biological events throughout Earth's history. This online platform builds upon the established TimeScale Creator desktop tool, delivering key visualization and analytical features within a fully accessible browser environment—eliminating the need for software installation.

In TSC Online, users can browse and overlay hundreds of curated chronostratigraphic, paleobiologic, chemostratigraphic, and other stratigraphic columns. The internal database contains over 20,000 biologic, geomagnetic, sea-level, stable isotope, and other stratigraphic events. Users can also upload external datapacks—such as British Isles stratigraphy or microfossil ranges with images—to build custom visualizations that include regional content not found in the core dataset.

Most of these datasets are contributed by experts involved in compiling the Geologic Time Scale 2020, or by national geological surveys and stratigraphic commissions. TSC Online also provides detailed pop-up windows for events with links to external resources, customizable display formats, exporting capabilities (PDF/SVG), search-and-display tools, depth-age cross-plots, and map-based regional interfaces. These map features even allow exploration of facies evolution through time using a time slider.

The presentation at this GeoBiology conference places special emphasis on biological event timescales. The system allows users to investigate evolutionary trends, extinction events, and fossil ranges across time and geography. These analyses can be aligned with environmental proxies, and the system includes tools for simple data mining—such as frequency statistics or visual comparison of parallel data columns through overlays or regression views. These features help geobiologists quickly detect patterns, identify correlations, and develop testable hypotheses based on large and complex datasets.

By making Earth history more explorable and visual, TSC Online enables researchers, educators, and students across disciplines to engage with data in new ways—from stratigraphy and paleoclimatology to geobiology.