Relief Globes (hedin.it)

What is Relief Globes (hedin.it)?

Relief Globes makes a printable Earth globe where the land rises and the seafloor sinks, built from NOAA's ETOPO 2022 elevation data. You choose full relief, a flat ocean or flat land, set the exaggeration for land and ocean (x250 by default), a height curve that lifts lowlands and shallow seas, and optional smoothing, and spin the globe in the browser. The interface is in English, Swedish or Japanese.

For printing you set the diameter at sea level (30 to 400 mm), the resolution (1, 0.5 or 0.25 degrees), the depth of the land shell and the alignment holes, and you can split the globe into northern and southern hemispheres that print without supports. The result is two STL files that fit together, one for the ocean and one for the land, so you can print them in two colors; country borders can come as a third STL. The tool reports whether each file is watertight, and the files are large: at the default 120 mm the ocean STL was about 19 MB.

It is free and needs no account, and the code is on GitHub under the MIT license, which covers the code but says nothing about prints. It is made by Björn Hedin of KTH as part of hedin.it, a portal of sustainability data visualizations where about 19 projects have a 3D print export, such as a monthly rain map, climate slices and Arctic sea ice thickness. It suits teachers, map lovers and anyone who wants a two-color relief globe.

What you can make

• Two-color relief globes of the Earth
• Globe hemispheres with alignment holes
• Country border overlays as a third part
• Rain, climate and sea ice data models on other hedin.it pages

How to use Relief Globes

1. Open the page and choose full relief, flat ocean or flat land
2. Set the exaggeration and the diameter
3. Pick the resolution and the hemisphere and border options
4. Create the STL files and print land and ocean in two colors