a field of color · one degree at a time

146 years, one stripe per year.

Each stripe below is a year of the planet's temperature, 1880 to 2025 — blue cooler than the twentieth-century average, red warmer. No axes, no gridlines, no mercy from the pattern. Scroll to read it.

read the stripes ↓

how to read

The picture needs no numbers. That was the point.

Stripes like these were designed to be readable at a glance — on a page, a mural, a scarf. Each column is a single year's average temperature anomaly, colored by how far it sat from the 1951–1980 baseline. The palette does the arguing.

Run your cursor across the field below to inspect any year: the anomaly, and a small trace of that decade's drift. Notice how the blues thin out after 1980 like a language losing its speakers.

1880s · mostly blue 1940s · a plateau 1980s → the turn 2015+ · record reds

the same data, standing up

ANOMALY (°C VS 1951–80)

Data note: this page uses an illustrative synthetic dataset shaped like the real instrumental record — it is art about the shape of a measurement, not the measurement itself. For the real stripes, visit the national met services; for the real anxiety, look outside.