STELA

Every place is a stone with a story carved in it.

Want to know what was here before you?

Stand anywhere and find out what the ground beneath you was long ago: seas, swamps, ancient animals and early people.

Tap the map to drop a pin and explore any place.

About this data

How to read it

Fossil records show what has been found near here, not everything that lived here.
Whether a place was sea, land or swamp is inferred from the rock type, so it is only ever "probably".
Animal records show where an animal was observed, not necessarily where it lives. Local names come from GBIF and may be incomplete.
Histories of an area may be contested or incomplete. Folklore is listed separately as "tradition, not verified history".
The narration is written by an open-weight AI model that is only given the facts shown in the sections. Check the sections.
Each section says how far from you its facts come from (your area, a wider area, the nearest place or a region). Facts from a wider scope are not about your exact spot.
The timeline in Ground is for orientation, not to scale. The styling is original decoration and does not depict any real culture or period.
Walk mode keeps your GPS on and uses more battery.

Sources

Macrostrat (rock units and ages)
Paleobiology Database (fossils)
GBIF / IUCN Red List (rare animal records)
Wikipedia (human history)
OpenStreetMap Nominatim (place names and hierarchy)

Privacy

Your location is used for this lookup only. Stela does not store or log it. Your passport stays in this browser.

My journey

Walk mode

Walk mode keeps your GPS on, so it uses more battery. It only watches while this page is open and visible, and asks for a new story after you move about 300 m.

About this project

What it does

Stela tells you what the ground under you was long ago: the rock and its age, what the place probably was (sea, land or swamp), fossils and rare animal records nearby, and early human history. Code collects the facts from open datasets, and an open-weight AI model only narrates those facts. If the model is unavailable you get the same facts as plain text.

Features

Use your location or drop a pin on the map
Rock, age and a "dig down through time" timeline
Fossils, rare animal records (with local names and credited photos) and people and history, each labelled with how far from you its facts come from
Listen to the story read aloud
Walk mode: a new story as you move into new ground
Passport, era badges and traveler ranks, stored only in your browser
Light and dark mode, optional sound effects

Run it, with your own model

The code is on GitHub. Clone it and point it at any OpenAI-compatible endpoint that serves an open-weight model, or at a local Ollama:

git clone https://github.com/RedwanNiloy/Stela.git
cd Stela
pip install -r requirements.txt

# your own hosted model
export LLM_BASE_URL=https://your-provider.example/v1
export LLM_API_KEY=...
export LLM_MODEL=your-model-name

# or a local model with Ollama (leave LLM_BASE_URL empty)
export OLLAMA_MODEL=gemma3:4b

uvicorn app.main:app --port 8000 --no-access-log

The model name is never hard-coded. The full setup, data sources and limits are in the README.

Stela on GitHub