Nematode Earth

if all the matter in the universe except the nematodes were swept away, our world would still be dimly recognizable
Nathan Cobb, 1914

Earth as a dim grey sphere against black. Africa and South America are legible as faint pale shapes in a veil of nematode density, and a thin bright rim of light runs along the limb. — A still from the live view: the last beat of the sweep, seen from 11,500 km. Earth’s matter is gone and what remains is nematode density alone — dimly recognizable, which is the claim being tested.

The moving version needs a GPU this browser will not give it.

Every frame of the live view is computed on the graphics card: a volumetric raymarch through a field of nematode density, with compute-emitted particles over the top of it. That needs the WebGPU API, and this browser did not expose navigator.gpu, so there is no device for it to run on.

What is missing is the motion. A roughly half-minute sweep takes Earth’s matter away layer by layer — atmosphere, then water, then rock — until only the nematode veil is left standing. From there, explore closer to the detail supported by this dataset.

WebGPU ships in current versions of Chrome, Edge and Safari, and in Firefox on some platforms. Updating this browser, or opening the piece on a desktop machine, is usually enough. Which builds have it is tracked at caniuse.com/webgpu.

The finding itself needs no GPU. Cobb also predicted that cities would show as denser nematode ground; we tested that and could not detect it. The methods page has the data, the statistics and the things we got wrong.

Read how this was made