The Corridor of Life

For hundreds of thousands of years, Earth's climate has swung between brutal extremes — ice ages that buried continents under kilometers of glaciers, and brief warm intervals. Through it all, our ancestors survived. But they could not settle, could not build, could not accumulate the knowledge that becomes civilization.

Then, around 11,700 years ago, the climate found an extraordinary equilibrium. Global temperatures settled into a narrow band — roughly -1°C to +1.5°C relative to preindustrial levels. This corridor of stability is the only climate regime that has ever supported agriculture, cities, writing, and everything we call civilization.

We are now leaving this corridor. In just 170 years of industrial emissions, we have pushed global temperatures beyond the upper boundary of the safe zone — and current trajectories project warming far beyond anything Homo sapiens has ever experienced. This visualization spans up to 1.2 million years of temperature data to show where we've been, the narrow corridor that made us, and where we may be headed.