Every discovery on this page is retrieved from a real database, live from your coordinates. The words were written by a human. A few honest footnotes follow.
The geosearch API returns Wikipedia articles that have been geocoded within 500 metres of your coordinates. It is the largest encyclopedia humanity has assembled and the most geographically comprehensive textual dataset we have. Some coordinates return extraordinary specificity: a building, a person, an event. Some return a generic suburb. The algorithm tries to find the most interesting thing. It does not always succeed. We did not write the Wikipedia articles. We only retrieved them from the place you are standing.
The fossil record is incomplete by definition. What is in the database is what has been found, described, and published. The absence of a fossil at your coordinates does not mean nothing lived there. It means no one has yet found and recorded it. The bounding box we query is about 200 kilometres across. The fossil returned may have been found at some distance from where you are standing.
The underground is mapped by volunteers. Cities are well covered. Rural areas less so. If a tunnel or buried waterway runs beneath you and it is not in the result, it may simply not have been mapped yet. The query radius is 150 metres. Overpass API is a public service maintained by volunteers; we fall back to two alternate instances if the primary is slow.
GBIF aggregates nearly three billion species occurrence records from museum collections, research institutions, and citizen scientists in 100 countries. We query a bounding box of roughly 20 kilometres around your coordinates and surface the most interesting recorded species. Common urban species (pigeons, house sparrows, Norway rats) are filtered out. If your coordinates return a pigeon anyway, we decided the silence was better.
The USGS maintains a global catalogue of earthquakes above a magnitude threshold, going back decades. We query within 200 kilometres of your coordinates and return the largest recorded event. Most places have one. Many places have had several. The ground is less still than it looks.
OBIS aggregates tens of millions of marine species observations from research expeditions and monitoring programmes worldwide. We query within 100 kilometres of your coordinates. This source fires most usefully for ocean and coastal coordinates, but occasionally for inland coordinates near historical marine survey points. The ocean is not where you might think it is, historically.
The fallback
Calculated from your device coordinates
Some coordinates come back quiet across all six databases. The reasons are sometimes geographical, sometimes just the ordinary fact that most of the earth has not been the subject of formal record-keeping. We think the quiet is its own kind of discovery. The distances to the equator and poles are exact. The feeling is real.
The prose
Hand-written · Template-based, not generative
Every sentence was written by Matt. The code selects among templates based on what the data returns. No language model writes or rewrites anything at runtime. If a condition isn't covered, the prose stays quiet about it. We'd rather say less than say something false.
Vol. I asks what the world did while you were reading a tab. Vol. II shows yesterday's sunset above your city. Vol. III finds what was already at your exact coordinates. The connection between the three is intentional. You may have noticed it.
All data is retrieved live at the moment you press the button. The same coordinates always return the same discovery. The databases are the same, the query is the same, and there is no randomness in the selection. If the result changes on a future visit, it means the underlying database changed. We think that's fine. The record is a living thing.