Credits

Every number on Drained Earth comes from the datasets below. Thank you to the people who collect and share them.

Elevation and bathymetry

GEBCO 2026 Grid: GEBCO Compilation Group (2026) GEBCO 2026 Grid (doi:10.5285/4f68d5c7-45eb-f999-e063-7086abc036fa). A global terrain model for ocean and land at 15 arc-second intervals, distributed by the British Oceanographic Data Centre via CEDA under the Open Government Licence v3. GEBCO data are not to be used for navigation.

Natural Earth 1:10m ocean, lakes, glaciated areas, Antarctic ice shelves, countries and named marine areas (also the country outlines in the true-size tool). naturalearthdata.com, public domain.
Country borders are where Natural Earth's 1:10m countries meet. They show who administers each area today (Natural Earth's de facto view), not a position on any dispute. A border is dashed where Natural Earth marks the area beside it as indeterminate or claimed by another country, such as Western Sahara, Bir Tawil or the Siachen Glacier.
IHO-IOC GEBCO Gazetteer of Undersea Feature Names, www.gebco.net: the names of trenches, ridges, seamounts and canyons in the depth readout. Served by the IHO Data Centre for Digital Bathymetry at NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information.

The warming gauge links a sustained change in global temperature (relative to 1850–1900) to the sea level it leads to. Warmer: the committed rise over the next 2,000 years for peak warming of 1.5, 2, 3, 4 and 5 °C (2–3, 2–6, 4–10, 12–16 and 19–22 m), and the likely rise by 2100 under the SSP1-1.9, SSP1-2.6, SSP2-4.5 and SSP5-8.5 scenarios, from the IPCC AR6 Working Group I Summary for Policymakers (B.5.3, B.5.4, Table SPM.1) and Technical Summary. Colder: the last ice age, about 6 °C colder with the sea about 130 m lower (Technical Summary). The globe shows the middle of each range, with straight lines between these points, which is a simplification.
Warming so far: 1.24 °C, the 2015–2024 average, from Forster et al. (2025), Indicators of Global Climate Change 2024, Earth System Science Data.

GeoNames, geonames.org: every city with 15,000 or more people, used for "What's under my ocean?". Licensed under CC BY 4.0. For each city, the nearest seafloor and the deepest point within 250 km of that coast are computed from the GEBCO 2026 grid.
Capital cities are the places GeoNames codes as a country's or territory's capital (feature code PPLC). Where GeoNames codes none, as for Israel, Palestine and Western Sahara, the map shows none.
Cities that appear as you zoom in are the GeoNames places of 50,000 people or more, biggest first, from the same GeoNames list (CC BY 4.0).
"Use my location" never sends your position anywhere: the browser gives it to this page, which only uses it to pick the nearest city. Share links contain that city, not your coordinates.

Every fact in a place card or sea-level caption links to its source right where it appears (NOAA, USGS, WHOI, MBARI, the Ocean Drilling Program, Britannica and peer-reviewed papers).
Height comparisons ("you could sink Kilimanjaro there") use: Statue of Liberty 93 m (NPS), Eiffel Tower 330 m (official site), Burj Khalifa 828 m (CTBUH), Mount Fuji 3,776 m and Kilimanjaro 5,895 m (UNESCO, UNESCO), Denali 6,190 m (USGS) and Mount Everest 8,849 m (2020 Nepal–China survey).
Highest point of each continent: Everest 8,849 m (2020 survey), Aconcagua 6,959 m (Britannica), Denali 6,190 m (USGS), Kilimanjaro 5,895 m (UNESCO), Elbrus 5,642 m and Puncak Jaya 4,884 m (Britannica), Vinson Massif 4,892 m (USGS).
Areas in the sea-level captions (for example "20.8 million km² of seafloor exposed") are computed from the GEBCO 2026 grid, using the same flooding rules as the globe.
Depths in the readout are values from the GEBCO grid, which averages each cell. They can differ from survey measurements of single points: the grid's deepest Puerto Rico Trench cell, for example, is deeper than the 8,376 m measured in 2018.

Sea level is ocean-connected: land below 0 m (the Netherlands, Death Valley, the Caspian Depression) stays dry until the ocean could actually spill into it. When draining, every part of the ocean drains by depth; we don't model seas that would be cut off behind shallow straits.
Water volumes and areas are computed from the GEBCO grid on a 1 arc-minute grid. Today's ocean comes out at 1.338 billion km³, close to the published 1.332 billion km³ (Charette & Smith, 2010, Oceanography 23(2), doi:10.5670/oceanog.2010.51).
Zoomed out, the globe shows grid averages (cells of about 5 km), so the deepest trenches and highest peaks look a little less extreme than single measured points (Challenger Deep is about 10,935 m deep; Mount Everest is 8,849 m high). As you zoom in, it switches to GEBCO's full 15 arc-second grid (cells of about 460 m); the depth readout says which grid it is reading.
Large areas of the seafloor have never been mapped by ship. There, GEBCO's grid is interpolated from satellite gravity measurements, so the finest zoom shows the grid's best estimate rather than surveyed detail.
Lakes are drawn at their water surface and are not drained, because they are not part of the ocean.

No cookies, no accounts and no ads. Your settings (units, which map layers are shown, whether you closed the coffee note) are kept in your own browser only.
Visits are counted anonymously with Cloudflare Web Analytics and, for what people do on the site (drains, stories, shares, saved images and videos, coffee clicks), Umami. Neither uses cookies; Umami respects Do Not Track.
"Use my location" only runs when you ask, and your position never leaves your device: it is matched to the nearest city on the device itself.

three.js (MIT), Preact (MIT), Vite (MIT)
Mediabunny (MPL-2.0), for the MP4 drain video
Data pipeline: rasterio/GDAL, NumPy, SciPy, Numba, Pillow
Ocean-connected flooding uses the Priority-Flood algorithm (Barnes, Lehman & Mulla, 2014).