# Biosphere Blue

**A coupled Earth-system simulator, in the spirit of SimEarth.**

Biosphere Blue is a single-file browser simulator built on a frequency-32 Goldberg polyhedron — a subdivided icosahedron dual that gives you a real geodesic globe with ~10,000 hex-and-pentagon cells. Plates drift. Mountains rise. Climate balances incoming solar against outgoing longwave. Rivers find their way to the sea. Biomes sort themselves by temperature and rainfall. Life climbs the ladder from prokaryotes to civilization, or gets wiped out by an asteroid you drop on it.

What's inside

- **Plate tectonics** — 12–16 plates, divergent/convergent/transform boundaries, real crust thickness and age tracking, volcanism, continental collision, seafloor spreading.
- **Energy-balance climate** — shortwave in, longwave out, albedo from ice/ocean/vegetation, lapse rate with elevation, Hadley-cell-inspired latitude bands, seasonal insolation.
- **Hydrology** — rainfall from latitude + elevation + wind shadow, river networks carved by flow accumulation, lakes that fill and overflow, sea-level rise and fall with ice caps.
- **8 biomes** — Ocean, Ice, Tundra, Desert, Grassland, Taiga, Temperate Forest, Tropical Forest. Holdridge-inspired classification assigned by temperature, moisture, and elevation. Each biome carries its own albedo into the climate model.
- **Evolving life** — 8 stages from a lifeless world through prokaryotes, eukaryotes, multicellular life, land plants, animals, sapients, and civilization. Each stage is gated on oxygen, temperature, world age, and stability. Civilizations can trigger their own collapse.
- **Player tools** — raise/lower terrain, flood, heat/cool, seed grass or forest, trigger volcanism, drop a meteor, place a monolith. Global disasters for ice age, greenhouse, and extinction.
- **7 preset scenarios** — Archean Earth (4 Gy), Modern Earth (pre-industrial), 2100 Business-as-usual, Snowball Earth, Carboniferous (high O₂), Venus runaway, Pleistocene ice age.
- **Runs in any modern browser.** No install, no account, no telemetry.

## Why I built this

SimEarth (Maxis, 1990) was one of the most ambitious games ever shipped on 640K of RAM. I wanted to see if a solo engineer could approximate its spirit with modern physics approximations, a proper geodesic grid, and a web browser. This isn't a clone — it's a love letter.

## About the designer

Michael Flynn is a Professional Engineer licensed in multiple states, practicing in hydrology and hydraulic modeling. The physics in Biosphere Blue is simplified for a game — it doesn't replace a GCM or a tectonics research code — but every subsystem has a real-world source and the scales are calibrated against real planetary data where possible.

## Not for scientific use

Biosphere Blue is a game. It is not intended for research, publication, or any decision that matters. If you need real climate or tectonics modeling, use a proper code.

## System requirements

- Any modern browser (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge) from the last three years
- Keyboard and mouse
- Integrated graphics are fine — the globe renders on canvas, no WebGL required
- Internet connection on first load (pulls Three.js from a CDN)