Interactive 3D globe
A globe shows the Earth without the stretching that every flat map has. This one runs in your browser, with no download and no account.
Open the 3D globeWhat you see on the globe
The surface is NASA’s Blue Marble: Next Generation image. NASA built it from satellite data to show the colour of the Earth’s surface for each month of 2004, at up to 500 meters per pixel. We use the December image with shaded ocean floors and mountains. It is a cloud-free composite, so it is not a photo of one moment.
The dark side shows NASA’s Black Marble city lights, observed in 2016. The line between day and night is worked out from the current time, so the half that is lit matches the real Sun right now. It updates while the page is open.
The five modes
- Satellite: the daytime surface with the live day and night line.
- Night: city lights all around the planet. See the night earth map guide.
- Borders: a political view. Each country gets its own colour, and no two neighbours share one.
- Places: tap the countries you have been to. They are saved in your browser, and you can save a world map of them as an image.
- Distance: tap two points to measure the great-circle distance, the shortest path over the Earth’s surface.
The cloud button adds NASA’s Blue Marble cloud composite. Like the surface image it is a still picture, not live weather.
Country facts
Tap any of the 199 countries and territories on the globe to see its flag, capital, population and area. Population is the World Bank’s latest figure (2025). Capitals and areas come from Wikidata. Where a capital is disputed or split between cities, the card says so instead of picking one.
Why a globe and not a flat map?
A sphere cannot be flattened without stretching it. The common Mercator map keeps shapes right in small areas but makes land far from the equator look much too big. On a globe, Greenland, Africa and Antarctica all keep their real size. Our true size tool shows how big the difference is.
For teachers
- Classroom mode makes the globe fill the screen with large text, made for projectors and smart boards.
- You can link straight to a country:
earthglobe.app/#country=BRopens with Brazil (use the two-letter country code).#mode=nightopens the night view. - There are no ads, no pop-ups and no sign-up, and students’ places stay on their own device.
- Ideas: find where it is night right now, compare the size of two countries, or measure how far apart two capitals are.
Speed on phones
The first images are small, about 80 KB for day and night together. Sharper versions load only on bigger screens or when you zoom in close. If your device asks for reduced motion, the globe skips the opening fly-in and does not spin by itself.
Sources
- NASA Earth Observatory: Blue Marble: Next Generation (Reto Stöckli, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center)
- NASA Earth Observatory: Earth at Night, Black Marble 2016 maps
- Natural Earth 1:50m country boundaries and populated places (public domain)
- World Bank, World Development Indicators: Population, total (SP.POP.TOTL) (CC BY 4.0)
- Wikidata (CC0): capitals and areas