Big History is the name of the fairly new effort to treat, as a single field of study, all of the past that has led to us human beings. It brings together the regimes of Cosmic, Earth, Life, and Human history, and involves both humanists and scientists. Big History is rich in insights about the human situation and how it has come to be, but it involves time scales that are enormous, compared to those we are used to, and therefore difficult to comprehend and to visualize.

ChronoZoom is a way to see those time scales graphically, by gradually zooming in from all of the past to the last few years. Early versions of ChronoZoom allowed a continuous zooming through time. We now present The ChronoZoom Time Atlas of Earth History and Big History, a new version with about a dozen panels, each homing in more closely on the present. Each panel graphically portrays many of the things that have happened in that interval of time, and each is accompanied by a brief descriptive text.

We invite you to explore Big History using The ChronoZoom Time Atlas, and we hope you find it both enjoyable and full of interesting historical insights!