When Climate Data Speaks: Letters From The Earth

Imagine the Earth could write to you. What would it say?

Letters from The Earth is an attempt to visualize global climate data not as charts or forecasts, but as daily first-person letters written by the Earth itself. It is an experiment to see whether data can be translated through narrative and emotion to convey a broader, more intuitive form of understanding than by raw numbers alone.

Letters From The Earth is an interactive globe with 103 markers highlighting different locations around the world. Selecting a marker reveals a short letter, updated daily, written in the first-person voice of the local biome. In these daily climate updates there are no statistics. No temperatures. No probabilities. No warnings or calls to action. Instead, each letter begins with a small sensory detail - a drying patch of mud, a bird unsettled by shifting air, a seed pod splitting open - and slowly widens into a description of the surrounding landscape’s mood.

For users who want grounding, the raw metrics are available, but deliberately secondary. The letter comes first; the numbers follow. Letters From The Earth rests on a clear hypothesis: data contains expressive qualities beyond analytics, and AI can help translate those qualities into forms that more people can emotionally access.

Whether the map succeeds in conveying a broader, more intuitive understanding of climate remains open to debate. The creator acknowledges that dashboards persist because they provide clear, actionable answers, and that textual “letters” may lack the sense of pull needed to consistently engage users. In response to this challenge, the project proposes audio as a future format, with the aim of lowering the effort required to engage and enabling a more intimate, embodied relationship with place.