Odd Earth

Why

The internet has plenty of lists of strange places, and most of them come with no sources. I wanted the opposite: spin a globe, land somewhere unlikely, and read a short story in which every fact has a source and every photo has a licence.

How it works

The home page is a 3D Earth at night, rendered with WebGL. Places show up on it as small points of light, and choosing one flies the camera there and opens its story, with a gallery of up to four photos. Surprise Me picks a random place and avoids repeating the last one; Next discovery keeps you going. Search, category filters and the browser's back button all work, and each story ends with hand-picked related places. If WebGL is not available, the same stories are still readable as text.

Each place also has its own server-rendered page with share cards, so a link to Derinkuyu shows Derinkuyu, and an atlas page lists every place by category. All of the content lives in one JSON file that is validated against a schema at build time, so a missing source, credit or oversized photo fails the build.

The places

There are 992 places, about two hundred in each of five groups: impossible landscapes, hidden worlds, abandoned places, natural phenomena and ancient wonders. They range from Racetrack Playa and the Richat Structure to Nan Madol, Catatumbo lightning, Knossos and the underground city of Derinkuyu, and include engineering heritage such as Jodrell Bank and the Forth Bridge.

The more than 3,800 photos come from Wikimedia Commons. Only CC0, public-domain, CC BY and CC BY-SA images are used, each one is credited in the story, and each is resized and stripped of metadata to stay within a fixed size budget. A small local editor and a command-line tool handle the research notes, coordinates, photo imports and reviews.

What is next

Version 0.9 is public. The stories keep getting editorial passes, and more places are on the way.