Interactive 3D · any place on Earth

What's beneath your feet?

Type an address or share your location and fly down into the ground under it: the rock the surveys have mapped, the drill holes, old workings and mining licences around you, then on through the crust to the centre of the Earth.

or try

Your location stays in your browser. We never store it.

How it works

What the page shows

Pick a place and the page cuts a block out of the ground beneath it, 1, 3 or 10 kilometres across, with the satellite picture and the real shape of the land on top. The walls of the block are painted with the rock the geological surveys have mapped there, layer by layer. Where a stratigraphic column exists (most of North America and some other regions) each layer has its measured thickness and age; elsewhere you see the surface rock and the bedrock below it, drawn to a typical thickness and labelled as such.

Into the block go the drill holes. We hold 3.8 million open-file holes that the governments of Western Australia, South Australia, New South Wales, the Northern Territory, Victoria, Tasmania, Québec, Finland, Sweden and Saskatchewan publish. Each hole is drawn at its true angle and depth, coloured by its best assay for the metal you choose. Pins mark 501,000 old workings, mines, deposits and mineral occurrences from Geoscience Australia and the USGS, and outlines show 912,000 mining and exploration licences from the open registers. Dive takes you down the layers one by one; To the core keeps going, through the crust and the mantle to the centre of the Earth, with the deepest hole at your spot and the deepest hole ever drilled marked on the way.

Places to try

Questions people ask

What is under my house?

Under almost every house is a thin skin of soil and loose sediment, then bedrock that can be hundreds of millions or billions of years old. Type your address above and the page shows the rock the geological survey has mapped at that spot, the layers beneath it where a stratigraphic column exists, and any drill holes, old mines or licences nearby.

How deep do drill holes go?

Most exploration holes are 50 to 300 metres deep: shallow aircore and RAB holes test the weathered rock, and diamond holes chase ore below 1,000 metres. The deepest hole ever drilled, the Kola Superdeep Borehole in Russia, reached 12,262 metres, about a third of the way through the continental crust.

Is my location stored?

No. When you share your location it stays in your browser. The page sends the point (rounded to about 100 metres) straight from your browser to Macrostrat for the rock, to Esri for the satellite picture and to the terrain service for the ground shape; our servers never see it unless you copy a share link yourself.

Where does the geology come from?

From Macrostrat, a free database run by the University of Wisconsin-Madison that brings together geological maps from national surveys and, across North America, stratigraphic columns that list each layer with its thickness and age. Outside the columns we show the mapped surface rock and the bedrock from the broader-scale maps, and say so when a layer is drawn to a typical rather than a measured thickness.

Why are there so many drill holes in some places and none in others?

We hold the open-file drill holes that governments publish: Western Australia, South Australia, New South Wales, the Northern Territory, Victoria, Tasmania, Québec, Finland, Sweden and Saskatchewan. Elsewhere companies still drill, but their holes are not in an open database we can republish, so the page shows the rock, the old workings and the licences instead.

How to read it

The block is drawn at true scale: one metre across is one metre down, and the land is not stretched. Drill holes come from company reports lodged with each government and are shown as they were reported: they belong to the explorers who drilled them, often decades ago, not to whoever holds the ground today. Grades are each hole's best single assay, not an intersection or a resource, and some reported values contain unit errors. Where a source gives no angle, a hole is drawn straight down and the card says so. Licences are a snapshot of each register and change every week; check the register before relying on one. Geological maps are generalised, so the boundary between two rocks can be tens of metres off at street scale. Nothing here is advice on a property or an investment.

Sources

More: Under Western Australia, the map of every open-file hole in the state; what exploration drilling is; how prospectors changed the world; and the mining glossary.

Keep exploring

Stories under the ground

The Super Pit gold mine at Kalgoorlie, Western Australia, at sunsetMining historyGold rushes, then and nowGold and lithium · WorldwideGold drill-hole columns rising over the Yilgarn goldfields on a satellite map of Western AustraliaData storyUnder Western AustraliaDrill holes · Western AustraliaGold drill-hole columns over the Abitibi on a satellite map of QuébecData storyUnder QuébecDrill holes · QuébecLessons from historyThe deposits that made fortunes, and who kept them1485-2008

All mining storiesThe world runs on rockAll mineralsMining by country

Cover photos from Wikimedia Commons: Super Pit, Kalgoorlie by Kgbo, CC BY-SA 4.0. Pictures: Kimberley, South Africa: miners and washing gear at the Bultfontein diamond mine. Woodburytype, 1888, after a photograph by Robert Harris., Harris, Robert, active 1881-1888. (Public Domain Mark 1.0).