Drop in whenever. One zoom from the first second to this week.
A time machine with no schedule. Get on anywhere, get off anywhere, and stay as long as you like.
Every ring is a window of time. The middle of the tunnel is the beginning of the universe. The outer edge is this week. Zoom in and a ring splits into smaller rings, so the zoom never runs out.
Each ring is cut into slices. Switch the slices between eight parts of the world and six topics. With places turned on, one ring shows you the whole planet at the same moment, which is the point of the whole thing.
Baby Bear is the whole thing crushed into one short paragraph. Facts stacked next to each other, no warm up, no wind down.
Mama Bear opens it back out and explains it plainly: what caused what, and what it meant for ordinary people.
Poppa Bear goes deep, and joins the dots across the world. It shows what else was happening at that same moment somewhere else, and says straight out whether the two had anything to do with each other or just share a date. Four windows go all the way down, and their rings are labelled deep: 40,000 years ago, 700 BCE, 1200 CE and 1964.
Go slowly and the rings keep splitting, so you see centuries, then decades, then single years. Scroll hard and they collapse back into wide era bands, which lets you cross billions of years in about a second. Slow down anywhere and the detail fills back in around you.
Two things happening in the same year does not mean one caused the other. Dates before writing are ranges, not years. People who lived at the same time were often completely unknown to each other. Every panel says which of these applies.
You have zoomed past the smallest window this atlas holds.