Recreating the “COVID spiral” plot for atm. carbon dioxide concentrations

In January of 2022, the New York Times published an opinion piece that was accompanied by a spiralized visualization of COVID-19 cases through time. Whether the figure was an effective, or attractive way to visualize that data was much debated in the Twitter-verse. In any case, as a fun side project, I went about trying to make a version of the plot that displayed some Earth Sciences relevant data and settled on the record of Atmospheric CO2 concentrations over the past 800,000 years. The results are shown here in the original, as well as three other color palettes. And yes, the modern time bin really is that much different.