Explore the history of Earth through water
The water in your glass is ancient. It has fallen as rain over prehistoric landscapes, filled oceans that no longer exist, frozen into ice, moved through rocks and living things, and is still cycling around Earth today.
AI reconstruction — not a photograph · Shutterstock AI/Shutterstock.com · Shutterstock Standard License
Start here — the questions people ask
- Is the water we drink dinosaur water?Almost certainly, yes — pick a glass and see.
- Was Mount Everest underwater?The summit rock formed under a shallow sea.
- What did T. rex drink?Water — and the finds on the edge of a city.
- Can volcanoes create water?Released, not created.
- Was Kansas underwater?One formation that recorded land and sea.
- Did dinosaurs drink seawater?Nobody can say yet — two papers disagree.
- What was the Western Interior Seaway?The sea that split America, on the map.
- Was my home underwater?Every place this site has looked at.
Four ways in
Explore by topic
Real photographs: Wlad74/Shutterstock.com · 228988681/Shutterstock.com · Wirestock Creators/Shutterstock.com · Shutterstock Standard License · Shutterstock Standard (free image collection, API) License
Or look at the whole world
Ancient maps of the entire planet — land, shallow sea and deep ocean — drawn from a published reconstruction of the ancient world. They show where the water was: at single moments, and across whole periods.
Ancient Earth
Lost oceans
Volcanoes and hot springs
Water through time
Start here: is the water we drink dinosaur water?
Almost certainly, yes — and it is the numbers that settle it, not a guess. Count the water molecules in one glass, then count how many glasses all the water on Earth would fill. The first number is about a thousand times bigger than the second. Molecules get broken apart and rebuilt, so no one can follow a single one from a dinosaur to your tap — but the atoms almost certainly made the journey.
See how the numbers workWhat did T. rex drink?What did Spinosaurus drink?Did dinosaurs drink seawater?What rivers did dinosaurs drink from?
8,360,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
water molecules in one glass. More than there are glasses of water on Earth.
The water time machine
Travel back through the eras and watch what the water was doing — the seas that came and went, the rivers that moved, the ice that arrived and melted. We are building the full machine now. The timeline below is where it starts, and the dates behind it are on the page it opens.
Was my home underwater?
Triassic Water will let you enter a place and travel backwards through deep time — to find out whether your town was once under a sea, which rivers the dinosaurs actually drank from, and why seashells turn up on mountain tops.
16 places are live so far, and they do not all answer the same way. The rest are being connected to their scientific datasets first, because a page that guesses is worse than no page at all.
- Was Denver underwater?Where two kinds of evidence have to be weighed against each other.
- Was Kansas underwater?One formation that records both land and sea.
- Was London underwater?A city sitting on the floor of a sea that is no longer there.
- Was Los Angeles underwater?Ground that cannot be placed yet, and rock our sources cannot answer for.
- Was Brighton underwater?More than half the fossils here come from a single age. That is a fact about digging.
- Was Hull underwater?Fossils found, catalogued, and never asked where they lived.
- Was Bath underwater?A full group of fossils that answers nothing, and an empty one that does.
- Was Texas underwater?Fossils the database returns under two headings at once.
- Was New York underwater?The most evenly divided evidence on the site.
- Was Colorado underwater?Dry ground, not far from a page about a sea.
- Was Utah underwater?Evidence that disagrees with itself, reported as it stands.
- Was Nevada underwater?The only age on the site where everything agrees.
- Was Arizona underwater?The page where the answer is mostly no.
- Was California underwater?One town full of fossils, and a capital with almost none.
- Was Las Vegas underwater?The smallest record on the site, and what it can carry.
- Was San Francisco underwater?Two ages our map of the ancient world cannot reach.
What we promise
- Free, and staying free
- No adverts, no affiliate links, no accounts, nothing to buy. There is no commission to chase here, so there is no reason to bend an answer.
- Real science, shown
- Every claim will trace to a published scientific source, named on the page. Where the science is uncertain, we will say so rather than smooth it over.
- Built for classrooms
- Projector-friendly lessons, age-banded explanations and worksheets teachers can use without spending twenty minutes tidying up a webpage first.