Life on Earth and Near You, Mapped

Today I launched EarthAtlas.org. Here's the short version of the story.

We were on a boat in the Puget Sound last summer, watching the water for fins and flukes, when one of my friends asked the obvious question: What whales are actually out here right now?

It's the kind of question you assume has an easy answer in 2026. We had phones. We had signal. We had apps for everything from identifying birds by their song to reserving a table across town. What we didn't have was a simple way to see, in one place, what marine mammals were near us, recently, with enough detail to be useful.

We tried. iNaturalist has the data, but the interface is built for submitting observations, not casually exploring them. GBIF has an extraordinary global dataset, but it's designed for researchers. Regional orca networks exist, but each one covers only its own pod. Between the four or five sources we pulled up that afternoon, we cobbled together a rough picture. It took most of the afternoon and half our collective patience. The whales, meanwhile, were off doing whatever whales do.

That afternoon stuck with me. And eventually, it became something.

The full story is over on Substack: why I built it, what it does, and why Earth Day felt like the right day to launch it.

Read the full story on Substack →

Or go straight to earthatlas.org and try it yourself. Look up your city. Pick a species. See what's been spotted near you lately.