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Terrain zoetrope

A 3D-printed animation of a real place. A ring of tiles shows the same coast, each with the sea a little higher. Spin it on a record player, look through the slots in the drum, and the sea rises before your eyes.

Pick a place

Drag and zoom the map: the square is the land on every tile.

The animation

Frames

Sea level in the last frame

Rise, then fall back again (a smooth loop)

The model

Plate

Your printer's bed

Height of the rise

Taller makes each step easier to see; the hills are eased down so they never tower over the tiles.

The slotted drum to watch it through Engrave each frame's level next to its tile Engrave the name in the middle and terraprinter.com underneath

Colours

In the 3MF the land, the water, the plate and the drum are each their own named part.

How to watch it

Put the plate on a record player (the hole fits the spindle) or a lazy Susan, and spin it clockwise.
Look through the slits at the tiles on the far side, with your eye close to the drum and level with the slits.
Or skip the drum: in a dark room, a strobe light at the rate below freezes every tile while its water rises.

Download

Instruction card

One page to keep with it: every frame's level, the exact strobe rate for 33⅓ and 45 rpm, how to watch it and how to print it.

Free for personal use, and for selling up to $5,000 a year with a TerraPrinter credit. Bigger sellers need a commercial license. Keep the data credits. License

How the zoetrope works

A Victorian toy, in 3D

A zoetrope shows you one picture at a time, very briefly, then the next one in the same place, and your eye joins them up into movement. The slits in the drum do that: you only see a tile through a slit when the plate has turned exactly one tile further. A strobe light flashing at the right rate does the same thing without the drum.

The sea comes in from the coast

The water isn't simply filled up to a height. It rises from today's sea over the real ground and only reaches land it can flow to, so a town behind dunes, ridges or hills stays dry until the sea tops them, and low land far inland stays dry. It is a what-if: no tides, storms, sea walls or levees, so land below sea level goes under with the first rise.

The numbers

The page works out the strobe rate and the speed of the animation for 33⅓ and 45 rpm and the number of frames you pick, and puts them on the instruction card. A 16-frame plate at 33⅓ rpm shows about 9 frames a second and plays the whole rise in 1.8 seconds.

Sized for your printer

The tiles are as big as the plate allows. The drum sits round the plate with one slit per frame, about a ninth as wide as the gap between slits, high enough that the wall hides the tiles nearest you. When it is bigger than your bed it comes in pieces that clip together.

In the classroom

Compare the same rise on two coasts: which floods first, and why? Count the frames until the sea reaches the old town. Then talk about how the animation works: why don't we see a blur?

A valley filling up

Switch to the valley mode and the water starts at the lowest point and rises, as if a dam closed the valley: Yosemite Valley as the lake it once was, or the Grand Canyon filled to the rim.

Elevation: Copernicus DEM GLO-30 (© DLR e.V. & Airbus) and Mapzen Terrain Tiles on AWS (SRTM, GMTED2010, ETOPO1 and others). Map © OpenStreetMap contributors, © CARTO. Want to check your own street? Try Will my home survive?, make contour layers, open the TerraPrinter app or see more 3D map gift ideas.