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🌬️ Loess Deposition: Wind-Built Silt Landscapes

Explore how wind sorts and deposits glacial silt to build thick loess plateaus downwind of outwash plains, and how grain size and wind velocity control the resulting layers.

Geology & Earth Science3DModerate60 FPS💨 Air & Wind 🌍 Earth

The simulation demonstrates how wind velocity and distance from a glacial outwash source control the thickness and grain-size distribution of an accumulating loess deposit, reproducing the characteristic downwind fining and thinning trend.

🔬 What It Demonstrates

🎮 How to Use

Adjust the wind velocity and outwash source grain-size sliders to see how silt is entrained, transported downwind, and deposited into layered loess, then inspect how the resulting deposit profile changes with distance.

💡 Did You Know?

The Chinese Loess Plateau contains a continuous windblown sediment record stretching back more than two million years, preserving dozens of glacial-interglacial cycles in a single stacked sequence of loess and fossil soil layers.

⚙ Under the hood

Explore how wind sorts and deposits glacial silt to build thick loess plateaus downwind of outwash plains, and how grain size and wind velocity control the resulting layers.

loessaeolian depositionglacial outwashsilt transportgrain-size sortingwind velocityquaternary geologysediment layering

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