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🌍 Milankovitch Cycles: How Earth's Orbit Drives Ice Ages

Explore how three slow astronomical rhythms — eccentricity, obliquity, and precession — reshape sunlight distribution on Earth and pace the glacial-interglacial cycles recorded in polar ice cores.

Climate, Ecology & Environment3DModerate60 FPS🌍 Earth ❄️ Ice & Cold

This interactive 3D simulation shows Earth orbiting the Sun while you adjust eccentricity, axial obliquity, and precession angle independently, visualizing how each cycle reshapes the orbital path, axis tilt, and the resulting seasonal distribution of sunlight across latitudes.

🔬 What It Demonstrates

🎮 How to Use

Use the sliders to set eccentricity, obliquity, and precession to any point within their real astronomical ranges, or press play to animate each cycle at its true relative period, then watch the insolation graph at 65 degrees north respond in real time.

💡 Did You Know?

The roughly 405,000-year eccentricity cycle is so mathematically stable that geologists use it as a precise 'metronome' to date rock layers and volcanic ash beds hundreds of millions of years old, far beyond the reach of ice cores.

⚙ Under the hood

milankovitch cyclesclimate scienceice agesorbital mechanicspaleoclimateobliquityeccentricityprecession

3D · Three.js / WebGL renderer · 60 FPS target · runs fully client-side, no install