About Erode Lab

Drop a pin anywhere on Earth. Erode Lab loads the real terrain, rock, active faults and climate around it, then fast-forwards thousands to millions of years. Rivers cut valleys, glaciers carve them into U-shapes, landslides trim peaks, sediment builds fans and deltas, and faults lift ranges. Pause at any moment and walk around on the ground.

What it simulates

• Rivers cut into bedrock in proportion to their discharge and slope (the stream-power law), faster in weak rock and slower in hard rock, and widen their valleys by cutting into the outside of bends.
• Glaciers grow above the snowline set by the local climate, flow under their own weight and erode their beds, turning V-shaped valleys into troughs and leaving moraines.
• Hillslopes creep, and fail as landslides when they get steeper than the rock can stand.
• Sediment is carried downstream and fills lakes, floodplains, fans and deltas.
• Tectonics: mapped active faults uplift or drop blocks of crust, strike-slip faults slide the land sideways, and the crust rebounds as erosion unloads it.
• Ice ages: optional glacial cycles driven by Earth's orbit lower the snowline and sea level and then release them.
• The deep past: where your pin was on the globe tens to hundreds of millions of years ago, with the climate, sea level and fossils of the time.

Real data, your hardware

The starting landscape is real: elevation from public terrain data, rock types from the Macrostrat geologic map, faults from the GEM Global Active Faults Database, the USGS and regional active-fault catalogues (New Zealand CFM, European EFSM20, Central America & Caribbean CCAF-DB, and Geoscience Australia), and climate from the ERA5 reanalysis. The full list, with credits, is on the Credits page.

The model runs entirely on your own computer, on the graphics card where your browser supports WebGPU (current Chrome, Edge and Safari) and on the processor otherwise. Nothing is simulated on our servers, which is why it's free to use.

How realistic is it?

The model is built from published equations of landscape evolution and calibrated against measured erosion rates. It reproduces the broad shapes of real landscapes, but it simplifies a great deal: it's one plausible future under the settings you choose, not a forecast. The data it starts from can also have gaps or errors.

How it's paid for

Erode Lab has no ads, on any plan. The science is free: every setting, data source and calibration is open to everyone. It's paid for by people who want more from what they make (Lab Tools and Lab Cloud), and by teacher classes and researcher seats. See Pricing, and Schools for how class links protect students.

Who makes it

Erode Lab is made by Rob Williams as part of DeepInTime, which also makes games on real terrain at deepintime.com. The two share the same real terrain data, but they're separate sites with separate accounts, and the lab has none of the games in it.

Questions, bug reports or corrections: hello@erodelab.com.