The entire planet is now searchable with Earth Index. What do you want to find?

You can now use AI to search the entire planet using Earth Index, unlocking critical environmental intelligence. Sign up for the waitlist today.

Today, Earth Genome is thrilled to announce a breakthrough achievement: for the first time ever, we’ve made the entire surface of the planet searchable through our AI-powered platform, Earth Index. By making the Earth searchable across 3.2 billion tiles, Earth Index unlocks a new level of capability, enabling anyone, anywhere, to use AI to understand the state of the environment with ease and precision.

We released the alpha version of Earth Index 10 months ago and have been amazed at how early users have leveraged its capabilities. A recent example is our collaboration with Mongabay, where Earth Index identified illegal narcotrafficking airstrips in the Amazon — critical information that helps address the violence and environmental destruction impacting indigenous communities. The animation below illustrates how efficiently Earth Index pinpoints these airstrips, akin to finding a toothpick on a soccer field.

The alpha version Earth Index has been adopted by dozens of indigenous organizations and their allies, global organizations like the World Bank, and multiple journalism organizations. Just last week, Radio Free Europe published a piece centered on over 1300 quarries operating in the Balkans they identified using Earth Index. These quarries have significant impacts on the environment and nearby communities, but Radio Free Europe was able to determine that just half of these quarries are operating legally.

So we’ve known for a while that Earth Index is a very powerful tool. Unfortunately, it has been limited in one key respect: only a small set of predetermined geographies were included in the platform. This limits the number of users and use cases that can benefit from the technology.

We’re delighted to share that we have now officially launched global coverage in Earth Index, empowering users everywhere to choose custom search locations anywhere on the planet. You can simply log into the platform, draw a boundary around any region of interest, and initiate a search to receive insightful results in minutes.

To enable this breakthrough, we’ve done something no one has ever done before: we tiled the Earth into over 3.2 billion overlapping 10 hectare tiles (that’s roughly 3% of the area of Central Park in Manhattan), and used cutting edge AI foundation models to encode those tiles in a searchable database. Earth Index’s intuitive interface makes accessing these tiles simple and powerful.

In testing, I’ve been excited by rapidly iterating through potential new applications. Each of these projects took less than 15 minutes from idea to initial implementation:

• Cataloging rubber processing plants in Thailand, the world’s largest producer of natural rubber.
• Identifying shrimp farming operations threatening vital mangrove ecosystems in the Gulf of Fonseca in Central America.
• Tracking the expansion of fracking wellpads in the Marcellus Shale in Pennsylvania.

But the most exciting aspect of this release is the discoveries users will make. I truly can’t wait to see the innovative ways our community will use Earth Index to uncover critical insights.

Find Environmental Insights with Earth Index Today

Starting today, existing users automatically gain access to the enhanced Earth Index. If you’re a potential user who would like to explore the platform, you can go to https://www.earthgenome.org/earth-index to sign up for the waitlist. We’ll be adding users off our waitlist as fast as possible.

Looking ahead, expect even more innovations, including:

• New AI foundation models that will greatly increase search accuracy
• Professional-grade features, such as the ability to train custom AI models
• Improved user experiences, like the ability to upload custom reference data

This global launch marks a significant milestone towards our mission to empower individuals and organizations worldwide with vital insights into our planet’s health. We gratefully acknowledge our funders, including the Rockefeller Foundation, Patrick J McGovern Foundation, and the AWS IMAGINE Program, whose generous support made this groundbreaking work possible.

Stay tuned. And if you’re interested in this work, we’d love to talk. If you’re a potential user, funder, or collaborator — please reach out. Together we can make a difference to protect the planet we all call home.