Interactive globe of the reference world. The base is NASA's Blue Marble Next Generation composite from MODIS imagery, relief is a topographic bump layer, and the observed cloud deck rides on a separate shell that can be switched off to expose the surface. A curated set of physical landmarks — the deepest trench, the largest impact structures, the great ice sheets, the mid-ocean ridge system — is selectable, and the literature feed tracks Earth and climate science the way every other Worlds page tracks its body. Earth is the calibration standard for the rest of the catalog: every process invoked on the other worlds — cratering, volcanism, tectonics, glaciation — has its type locality here.
Earth is marked in cyan on a live map of the uniquely named bodies of the solar system — planets, dwarf planets, and approximately 26,000 named minor planets and comets out to the Kuiper belt — together with the interstellar objects and the escaping spacecraft. Positions are evaluated at load time and each body links to its source record.
The sphere is rendered in Three.js at Earth's equatorial radius, 6378.1 km, scaled to scene units, with the true flattening of 1/298.257 applied as a polar scale. The base map is NASA's Blue Marble Next Generation, the cloud-free MODIS composite assembled by Reto Stöckli for NASA Earth Observatory. A topographic bump layer shades relief from global elevation data, and the cloud deck is the matching MODIS cloud composite carried on a separate shell at 1.006 R that can be toggled and drifts slowly against the surface — a reminder that it is one observed configuration of the atmosphere, not live weather. Textures are loaded from Maps/textures/earth_*.jpg.
Earth sits outside the USGS Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature, so Data/worlds/earth/features.json carries a curated set of physical landmarks chosen as type localities for the processes invoked across the rest of the catalog: Chicxulub and Vredefort for impact cratering, Mauna Loa and Tambora for shield and explosive volcanism, the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and the Great Rift Valley for spreading and rifting, the two great ice sheets for glaciation, and the Mariana Trench for subduction. Coordinates are WGS 84.
The research panel queries body_server.py at /api/earth/latest; absent a server, the seed research.json and ADS search links are used. The feed is gated to Earth-system science — geology, geophysics, climate, oceanography — rather than the astronomical usage of "earth-like". The engine, server and data schema are shared with the other Worlds globes.