HomeEcology & Conservation BiologyPhosphorus Cycle: Bedrock to Sediment

Phosphorus Cycle: Bedrock to Sediment

Interactive 3D phosphorus-cycle simulator: watch phosphorus particles flow from weathering rock through soil, plant biomass, runoff water and finally bury in lake sediment, with adjustable weathering, fertilizer, uptake and runoff rates and live pool readouts.

Ecology & Conservation Biology3DModerate60 FPS📱 Mobile-adapted
ecological-cycles ↗ Open standalone

The phosphorus cycle is the slow, gas-free biogeochemical cycle that ultimately limits how much life an ecosystem can sustain. This simulator renders it as a real 3D landscape — weathering rock, a soil layer, a stand of plants, a body of water and a sediment floor — and populates it with a swarm of instanced particles, each one a parcel of phosphorus rolling per-capita transition probabilities every simulated year exactly as the underlying compartment equations dictate. Four controls — weathering rate, fertilizer input, plant uptake rate and runoff/erosion rate — let you push the system from a slow natural cycle into a fertilizer-driven regime where the water pool floods with dissolved phosphorus (a live eutrophication-risk readout) before it settles out and is permanently buried in the sediment, illustrating why phosphorus, unlike carbon or nitrogen, never really comes back once it reaches the sea floor.

⚙ Under the hood

An interactive 3D simulator of the phosphorus cycle: watch particles of phosphorus flow from weathering bedrock through soil, plant biomass and runoff water before settling permanently into lake sediment.

phosphorus cyclebiogeochemistryecologyeutrophicationnutrient cyclingsediment

3D · Three.js / WebGL renderer · 60 FPS target · runs fully client-side, no install

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