untitled_ocean_simulation

World ocean

About

A complete ocean

The aim is the most complete coupled ocean that can run in a browser — every kind of ocean, not one pretty tank. A North Sea shelf, a Humboldt upwelling cell, an Antarctic slope, a tropical gyre, a coral reef, an ice edge, a hydrothermal vent: each kilometre should be a living system, not a backdrop.

Physics first, then chemistry, then life. Light, nutrients, oxygen, and the seafloor set the budgets; animals only exist if they eat something and are limited by something. The camera is a window. If a feature does not change a budget, a habitat, or a sensory cue, it does not belong yet.

The system at once

Solid is live. Dashed is still open. Near the camera: agents. Kilometres out: density. Basin: Eulerian fields.

Glossary

PAR: Photosynthetically active radiation. The light phytoplankton can use. Dies with depth (Beer–Lambert). Fog, caustics, growth, and visual hunt share it.
K_d: Diffuse attenuation. How fast PAR dies with depth (turbidity). Sets the 1% light depth — the photic limit.
NPZD: Nutrients, phytoplankton, zooplankton, detritus. The bloom budget. N, P, Z, D. A 128×128 patch times a shared column, not a 128³ grid.
DVM: Diel vertical migration. Night near the surface to feed; day deeper as a visual refuge. Zooplankton, forage fish, lanternfish, and Humboldt squid all run a schedule.
OMZ: Oxygen minimum zone. A hypoxic band below the mixed layer in eastern-boundary and tropical cells. Humboldt’s day refuge. Tunas and sharks stay above their o2Min.
DSL: Deep scattering layer. The mesopelagic sound and biomass layer. Lanternfish in this catalog; photophores restore a fraction of visual detect in the dark.
Q10: How much a rate changes per 10 °C. Metabolism, graze, and NPZD all scale with column temperature.
SST: Sea-surface temperature. Latitude climatology plus season plus the anomaly knob. Gates some catalog rows.
Occupancy: Seasonal presence on a hull. The day-of-year slider. Not a swim between cells.
Mixed layer: Well-mixed surface water. Winter mixes it deeper; storms mix it deeper still. Shear, oxygen, and NPZD all read that depth.
Nutricline: The depth where nutrients increase. Climate upwell and storms shoal it so N sits in the light.
Photic: The sunlit layer, down to ~1% light. Photosynthesis lives here. Below it the window goes near-black, not herring-green.
Ice: Sea-ice concentration and thickness from latitude and season. Pack ice shades PAR; ice algae produces in the top metres. Polar night / midnight sun follow the sun.
Benthos: Organic carbon on the seafloor (pelagic rain plus microphytobenthos) and living infauna density. Cod graze the living store.
MPB: Microphytobenthos. Light-driven production on photic floors — the shelf analog of ice algae.
Type II: Saturating graze: fast when food is scarce, capped when it is dense. School fish on z or p; filters on the bloom.
GEBCO / GMRT / HYCOM: Atlas. GEBCO tints the world map; GMRT is the seafloor under the animal; HYCOM is a mean current when that service answers.
Vehicle: A rare Reynolds integrator — sharks, whales, giant squid, air-breathers. Abundance is a catalog knob: numerous mesopredators are hashed-grid school with diet: "bite", not a second 20k loop.
Agents / Eulerian: Near the camera: individuals. Kilometres out would be density. The basin is fields on a grid. Not more fish farther out.

Coupled now

Cell and atlas. World map is home. Click water for a 1 km cell (GEBCO tint, GMRT floor, HYCOM mean current when it answers). Land is not a cell. Cells is a picker of named kilometres: the 2 × 2 km catalog tank (every species, stepped shelves, 2000 m) plus biomes from the coupling figure. Overlay paints current habitat for any catalog taxon — several at once — on this day of year (range vs spawn, search, a day-of-year scrubber). Gap tiles still open the pelagic water at that site — they do not invent coral or a vent. Polar ice and a living bed are coupled. Neighbour chunks cache; animals do not swim between cells. Clock: 16 min ≈ 1 day, twelve sim days per year. Polar night follows the sun. Storms mix deeper, shoal the nutricline, and raise current.
Fields. One shared current (sampleFlow: tide, longshore, shear, eddies, atlas mean, climate upwell). Beer–Lambert PAR (samplePAR) shared by fog, caustics, phytoplankton, and visual hunt. Pack ice is an I₀ skin. A shelf floor inside the photic envelope stays sunlit. Temperature and Q10 (sampleTemp). Dissolved oxygen and OMZ (sampleO2). Sea ice (climateIce: concentration, thickness, ice algae). Separable NPZD (128×128 patch × column: N, P, Z, D). Benthos: detritus and microphytobenthos onto the bed; living infauna; cod graze the living store.
Agents. One hashed-grid school (cap 20k): grazers on a bloom cap, piscivores on a prey-capped slice of the same grid. Hungry school hunters charge through forage, bite on overlap, then may turn. Vehicles are the rares and air-breathers. Silhouettes are authored glTFs: one mesh per vehicle (orca male/female dorsal), one guild mesh per school look.shape, recolored from catalog look. Social modes: polarized, loose, scatter. Polarized shoals pack on nearest neighbors. Open-ocean faces steer inward before the glass (no wrap); the beach is still a shore. Vehicles that live in groups travel as pods (orca one matriline; common dolphin 1–3 pods; hammerhead and bluefin one school). Gaits on vehicles: burst, ram, jet. Giant squid is a handful of vehicles in a deep cell. Sighted photic detect ~22 m; sperm whale and orca echo acquire across the cell. Air-breathers swim to the surface before the tank is empty, hang and blow, then a flukes-up dive. Empty tank underwater is drowning. Spawn against the local seafloor; maxDepth is biological, then the floor, then oxygen.
Budgets. Grazer ceiling = bloom mean × photic production. Piscivore ceiling = live forage / prey ratio on the same grid. Type II graze on z or p. Bites restore energy; missing prey is a starve. Sperm whale × giant squid is the vehicle-on-vehicle bite; Humboldt is school huntTaxa. Q10 and hypoxia scale rates. Closed mass: graze, excretion, carcass, sink, remineralisation, MPB uptake, infauna graze, benthos graze.
Range. Hulls, Wikipedia / IUCN / Cypron rasters, and catalog niches scored by season, kilometres from shore, SST, ice, OMZ, upwell, and shelf-vs-oceanic floor, then trophic gates. A matching Wikipedia world map is scanned onto a 360×170 occupancy raster (scripts/wiki_ranges.json); family/genus ids do not steal a single-species map. Neritic taxa without a scanned map clip a hull envelope to kilometres from shore, so Overlay is a coastal ribbon, not a filled box. Occupancy scales abundance on a year-round hull; it does not empty a cell the species still lives in. School share and vehicle count scale with the weight. Overlap is habitat. Empty is honest.
Window. Water, fog, and fish follow the same K_d. Depth layers, station briefing for this kilometre, census, field-notes cards (live diet and hunt lock), physical knobs (turbidity, SST anomaly, oxygen anomaly, ice anomaly, day of year, storm). Map Overlay paints live habitat (range vs spawn). Camera lamp (K) is a dive torch — a local beam, not a scene fill, and not habitat.

School (hashed grid)

herringcapelinmenhadensardinepilchardanchovysardinellamackerelflying fishspratsand lancepolar codAntarctic silverfishPacific saurymarket squidlanternfishkrilljack mackerelIllexskipjackyellowfinmahibarracudasailfishAtlantic codAntarctic toothfishHumboldt squid

Vehicles

blue sharkbluefingreat whitetiger sharkhammerheadwhale sharkminkehumpbacksperm whaleorcacommon dolphingiant squid

Field guild

benthos

Not in the model yet

Closing a row means moving it into Coupled now, not deleting the gap. A mesh without a budget is still a gap. Species cards keep per-taxon holes under Not in the model.

Ocean as a system. Salinity, density, pycnocline; nutrient species beyond one N (Si, Fe, PO₄, NH₄ vs NO₃, N₂ fixation, denitrification); microbial loop, DOM, viruses; full 3D NPZD; carbonate chemistry, pH, Ω; air–sea heat, freshwater, CO₂; horizontal O₂ fronts, bed oxygen, dead zones; live wind, Ekman spiral, HYCOM w; mesoscale eddies as 3D rotors; internal waves, baroclinic tides, seamount mixing; surface gravity waves, Stokes drift, Langmuir; climate modes (ENSO, IOD, NAO, PDO); basin streaming of agents; density / super-individuals beyond the camera; AquaMaps / OBIS / acoustic DSL; fishing mortality; age, stage, larval drift; animals swimming between cells (occupancy windows are coupled); senses as fields (echolocation, olfaction, electroreception, lateral line, magnetoreception, soundscape); moon, lunar DVM; marine snow / migratory carbon pump; size-structured plankton; vehicle–vehicle bites besides sperm whale × giant squid; Humboldt cannibalism; disease; pressure / compressibility; sediment grain size and transport.

Seafloor besides tropical reefs. Named infauna and epifauna as agents (the bed field is density, not a worm mesh); crabs, lobsters, shrimp; echinoderms; sponges, sea pens, gorgonians, glass-sponge reefs; cold-water coral; flatfish, skates, rays, chimaeras; haddock, pollock, hake, whiting, wolffish; grenadiers, cusk eels, snailfish, tripod fish, hagfish; sleeper sharks, sixgill, Greenland shark, dogfish; kelp forests and urchin–otter coupling; maerl; bioturbation and sediment redox; phytodetritus pulses; hydrothermal vents; cold seeps, brine pools, hydrates; whale falls, wood falls; seamount sessile fauna; canyon turbidity currents; hadal trenches; sand-lance burying; demersal eggs on gravel; bottom water, contour currents, iceberg scour; trawl disturbance; octopus, cuttlefish, benthic squid egg mops.

Coral reefs. Hard coral as a field agent; zooxanthellae, bleaching, OA; rugosity / reef profile; crustose coralline algae; herbivory (parrotfish, surgeonfish, Diadema); cryptobenthic fish; corallivores and invertivores; groupers, snappers, morays; reef sharks and rays; octopus, reef squid, cleaners; anemones, giant clams, sponges, soft corals; crown-of-thorns and algal phase shifts; mass spawning; reef soundscape; wave energy; sediment, nutrients, island freshwater; grazing halos; seagrass and mangrove connectivity; nocturnal shift; territoriality, sex change, cleaning stations.

Open ocean. Gelatinous zooplankton; phytoplankton functional types; DSL as sound; the rest of the mesopelagic fish; glass, colossal, and vampire squid; beaked whales; blue, fin, sei, right whales; mako, thresher, oceanic whitetip, porbeagle; manta / devil rays, ocean sunfish; sea turtles; seabirds; neuston, Sargassum, flotsam, FADs; fronts and eddy rings; tuna–dolphin–bird associations; flying-fish glide; counterillumination, chromatophores, ink; bait-ball hydrodynamics; endothermy in tunas and lamnids; oligotrophic gyre vs bloom biome; western boundary currents as live jets; migratory carbon pump; whale falls from this column; remoras, pilotfish; surface boiling, lunge, spyhop / breach; jack-mackerel piscivory; lunar inhibition of DVM; diadromy.

Polar seas and ice. Ice types, drift, and age; mapped leads and polynyas; ice-edge blooms as a filament; ice seals; walrus, polar bear; penguins; beluga, narwhal, bowhead; Greenland shark; icefish and other notothenioids; krill lipid overwinter; iceberg scour, dropstones, glacial plumes; ice-shelf cavities, bottom-water formation; wave-washing seals off ice.

Coasts, estuaries, intertidal. Estuarine circulation and salt wedge; tidal zonation; mangroves; salt marsh, mudflat, wrack; seagrass meadows; oyster reefs, mussel beds, rocky intertidal; sandy-beach surf zone; anadromous and catadromous fish; seals, sea lions, fur seals; coastal birds; manatee, dugong, sea otter; sea turtles on beaches; hypoxic dead zones as a map; river plumes, CDOM, sediment; live wind-driven upwelling coasts; harmful algal blooms; inlet larval ingress, fjord sills, lagoons; beach-spawning die-offs; flats; bull shark / sawfish in rivers.

This panel is the live inventory of the model. 1 km cells · Esc returns to the last cell if you have entered one.

Click water on the map to enter a 1 km cell · Cells picks a named kilometre