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Biosphere — A Living 3-D Earth Built From the Federal Data Nobody Made Beautiful

The U.S. government runs thousands of sensors over this country every minute — rivers, earthquakes, wildfires, the spread of disease, the aurora overhead — and files the readings where almost nobody looks. Biosphere is a living, rotatable 3-D Earth built entirely from that data: the planet, as the instruments actually see it.

3D WebGL globe of Earth facing North America, glowing with live U.S. federal data: green aurora ribbons over the Arctic, orange earthquake and wildfire points, a hurricane ring in the Atlantic, and a bright blue atmosphere, with the BIOSPHERE title and layer panel.

What it is

Spin the globe and flip on a living layer: ~9,000 river gauges reporting their flow live from the USGS, the white-nose bat plague, the current drought belt, endangered-species habitat, every earthquake of the last month (the Ring of Fire lights up on its own), active wildfires, volcanoes, a century of hurricane tracks, 36,000 tornadoes, every National Park, and the live aurora from NOAA. It's a real-time day/night Earth with city lights on the dark side, a ⏳ time-machine to scrub a century of storms and quakes, a "fly to your home" readout, a live "right now" ticker, and a one-click cinematic tour.

How it’s built

  • A hand-built WebGL globe (Three.js): triangulated day/night continents, atmosphere, starfield, HDR bloom, a real-time sun terminator + city lights, and toggleable coastline/country/state borders.
  • 11 layers, ~a dozen live federal feeds fetched in-browser (all CORS): USGS Water Services, USGS/USFWS white-nose, US Drought Monitor, USFWS critical habitat, USGS earthquakes, NIFC wildfires, NOAA HURDAT2 + SPC tornadoes, NOAA SWPC aurora, NPS parks. Light feeds auto-refresh every few minutes.
  • Every layer is badged live vs. archival so it's clear what's current; dense point layers are tuned so they read as glowing fields, not white blobs; respects reduced-motion.
The BIOSPHERE globe framed over the western U.S. and Pacific Ring of Fire, showing dense orange drought contour bands across the West, clustered wildfire points, and earthquakes tracing the Aleutian arc.
The Ring of Fire, live — earthquakes, wildfires, volcanoes, and this week’s drought footprint over the western U.S.
Close-up of the globe filling the frame with the continental United States: green endangered-species clusters in the Pacific Northwest, Appalachia and Florida, orange drought contour lines, and glowing data points.
Zoomed to the lower 48 — endangered-species hotspots, the drought belt, and live seismic activity, all federal data.

On the theme

The theme was go get that 'murica data — and I wanted to argue that the punkest thing you can do with a boring federal dataset isn't a dashboard, it's to make people feel it. The government has an extraordinary, minute-by-minute portrait of this living continent, scattered across a dozen agencies in formats no one opens. I put it all on one globe. This one's for Natasha. 🌎 Punk isn't dead. It's compiling.

Try it →Code →All the builds →

Shout-out

Part of the competition is cross-referencing other builders. So: shout-out to Kyle Sebestyen — whose ambitious 3-D "Boomtown" is what made me stop stacking small builds and go big on one complete project instead. He swung huge; I tried to swing just as hard and land it.

Built for Summer Into AI 2026 (Competition #2), hosted by Eric Rhea. More in the build log.