An interactive 3D globe visualising Earth as it would look with all water removed, rendered using real bathymetric elevation data.

Relief Exaggeration - Earth's full elevation range (≈20 km, Mariana Trench to Everest) is only 0.3% of its radius, imperceptible at any rendered scale. A true-to-scale globe would look like a billiard ball. The bump shader exaggerates slopes roughly ×10–15 to make relief visible.

Ice vs Bedrock Elevation - The elevation tiles record surface altitude, including ice sheets, not the bedrock beneath. Antarctica and Greenland are the main regions affected: West Antarctica's bedrock lies up to 2 500 m below sea level and would be a submerged archipelago without its ice cap; much of Greenland's interior bedrock is also below sea level. The % submerged figure therefore understates how much land would be flooded if those ice sheets melted.

Polar Distortion - Web Mercator tiles don't cover latitudes above ~85°. Pixels beyond that threshold repeat the last valid tile row, causing slight blurring near both poles.

Elevation tiles from Tilezen / Mapzen, via AWS Open Data Terrain Tiles.

ArcticDEM (NSF) · Australia © Geoscience Australia 2017 · Austria © offene Daten Österreichs · Canada Open Government Licence · Europe EU-DEM © European Union · ETOPO1 NOAA/NCEI · Mexico INEGI · New Zealand © LINZ · Norway © Kartverket · UK © Environment Agency 2015 · US 3DEP / GMTED2010 / SRTM courtesy of the U.S. Geological Survey

Country boundaries from Natural Earth, via world-atlas (public domain).

The % submerged figure is derived from the elevation dataset as a hypsographic curve (the cumulative distribution of Earth's surface area by elevation).

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