Deep Time Walk App

Deep Time Walk App

Deep Time Walk App

Walk a history of our living Earth

 

Download on the Apple StoreGet it on Google Play

Download on the Apple StoreGet it on Google Play

The award-winning Deep Time Walk App is a ground-breaking tool that enables anyone, anywhere to experience a walking audio history of the living Earth.

As you walk through time, the dramatised audio narrative combines scientific evidence with poetry to tell the story of Earth’s formation, providing a unique and educational perspective of deep time. Sensitively designed and engineered by a team of experts using appropriate technology*, the experience encourages you to focus away from the digital screen and connect with the natural world around you.

Walk Through Time

Get outdoors to participate in a 4.6km Deep Time Walk anywhere in the world. As you walk at a rate of 1 million years per metre, you journey across Earth’s 4.6bn geological timeline, with the app silently calculating your speed and distance adjusting the soundscape accordingly. This enables you to focus on listening to an extraordinary story of Earth history without distraction. As you walk through time, a dramatised narrative provides different perspectives on how Earth formed.

Learn Earth History

The narration for the walk is based on the latest scientific evidence about how our planet evolved over the vast expanse of geological time. At the start of the walk, you learn about the accretion of the Earth from a disc of rocky debris and how our moon formed, you meet volcanoes and encounter the immense meteorites of the Late Heavy Bombardment. Later in the walk you hear about key events such as the first appearance of oxygen-producing photosynthesis, The Great Oxidation, the evolution of the first nucleated cells, and the appearance of multicellular life. A time-contextual glossary is available to look up key concepts.

Experience Deep Time

The kinetic Deep Time Walk is an embodied experience, bringing the rational and somatic together into a unique learning tool. The last million years are measured using your body, with the final 20cm representing just 200,000 years – roughly the time during which Homo sapiens has been on Earth. The Deep Time Walk App helps you recognise the long geological processes that have produced the conditions for the evolution of life, understand our common evolutionary history with all life and consider the geological impact of humanity.

Listen to Audio Samples

As you listen to and ‘walk within’ the latest scientific evidence for Earth history and its self-sustaining nature, you experience the living quality of our Earth and begin to recognise the long geological processes and self-regulating patterns that have produced the conditions for the evolution of life.

Click on the blue play buttons below to listen to samples.

Appropriate Technology

Walk with Nature

The Deep Time Walk is designed to work seamlessly in the background, allowing you to fully embrace the walking experience. Before the walk begins, our narrator suggests you put your device in a pocket, encouraging your focus to shift from the screen to the natural world around you.

Stereo or Gaiaphonic

Our soundscape is produced in glorious stereo, creatively balanced between left and right ears. However, we also created a gaiaphonic mode, allowing all the sound to be channelled into one ear, allowing the other to be present to the world around you.

Old or new

We’ve designed the Deep Time Walk to work on as many smartphones as possible – old or new. If you have a smartphone from the past six years, it will likely run the Deep Time Walk. If for some reason you can’t run the Deep Time Walk, let us know – we don’t want technology to be a barrier.

Accessible

We are conscious that not everyone can walk 4.6km. For this reason, we have developed a Mobility-Assist mode. This enables you to listen to the narration in a simulated form without moving. For those not able to hear the soundscape, the script for the narration and our Deep Time Cards may be a source of education and inspiration.

Gift Economy App

Many apps are sold with an upfront fee or have a freemium business model with revenue generated through advertising or selling data. We don’t want any distractions so we don’t sell advertising and will never sell your data. Instead we have created a Gift Economy App, asking for any donations you are able to give to help the not for profit organisation develop new tools.

No signal/connection required

The Deep Time Walk does not require any internet connection, so you are free to explore without any concerns for mobile signal or wifi connection. We don’t utilise GPS and do not track your geographical location. It can be used anywhere in Earth.

Creative Excellence

A team of experienced professionals have come together to produce the Deep Time Walk Mobile Guide. The script is written by Peter Oswald (ex-playwright in residence at Shakespeare Globe, London) and Dr Stephan Harding (a collaborator with Earth scientist James Lovelock).

The audio is directed by Jeremy Mortimer (over 200 productions for BBC Radio) and designed by Jo Langton (a BBC Studio Manager), with voices provided by leading actors Paul Hilton (Garrow’s Law, The Bill, Silent Witness), Chipo Chung (Doctor Who, Sherlock, Into the Badlands) and Peter Marinker (Love Actually, Event Horizon, Judge Dredd).

Our team