The ChronoZoom Time Atlas of Earth History and Big History

"Big History" is the currently active effort to bring together in a unified way all of the information about the past, both humanistic and scientific. It is now taught at a number of high schools, colleges and universities. However, one of the problems for anyone teaching Earth history or Big History is how to help students – or anyone – to comprehend the time scales. The panels below help address this challenge by presenting Big History in a sequence of time scales. The panels cover intervals of time that differ by about a factor of ten, but rather than rigid, order-of-magnitude separations, each panel begins at a significant date in history. Each panel is accompanied by a page of text, discussing the historical features shown in the panel.

Users may view the panels and text side by side on a computer monitor to facilitate zooming in on the graphic panel, or may opt to print the entire document in book form or select individual time periods: (For the best user experience, we recommend downloading the documents and viewing directly in Adobe Reader.)

	Chart	Text	Introduction
Panel 0	Chart	Text	Big Bang and Cosmos
Panel 1	Chart	Text	Cosmos (13.8 Ga to now)
Panel 2	Chart	Text	Earth and Life (4.567 Ga to now)
Panel 3	Chart	Text	Phanerozoic (541 Ma to now)
Panel 4	Chart	Text	Cenozoic (66 Ma to now)
Panel 5	Chart	Text	Pliocene-Pleistocene (5.33 Ma to now)
Panel 6	Chart	Text	Bruhnes Normal and Ice Age (780 ka to now)
Panel 7	Chart	Text	Out of Africa (60 ka to now)
Panel 8	Chart	Text	Civilization and Writing (3,500 B.C. to now)
Panel 9	Chart	Text	Global Reconnection (1400 A.D. to now)
Panel 10	Chart	Text	Cold War / Long Peace (1945 to now)
Panel 11	Chart	Text	Dating and Periodizing History (Last 5 years)
Panel 12	Chart	Text	The Character of History (Last 6 months)
"now" = 2000 A.D. B.C. = B.C.E. A.D. = C.E. Ga = billion years ago Ma = million years ago ka = thousand years ago