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🏖️ Sediment Grain-Size Distribution and the Wentworth Scale

Explore how sedimentologists classify particles from boulders to clay using the Wentworth scale, sort them with a sieve stack, and read transport history from the shape of a grain-size curve.

Geology & Earth Science3DModerate60 FPS🌍 Earth

The simulator demonstrates how a sediment sample's transport history and depositional environment are encoded in the shape of its grain-size distribution curve, letting you compare a well-sorted, narrow desert-sand distribution against a poorly-sorted, broad glacial-till distribution built from the same underlying Wentworth size classes.

🔬 What It Demonstrates

🎮 How to Use

Choose a source sediment mixture or build your own by adjusting the proportion of material in each Wentworth size class from boulder down to clay. Select a transport process, such as wind, river, beach wave action, or glacial deposition, to see how that process filters the mixture. Run the virtual sieve stack to shake the sample through progressively finer mesh sizes, then view the resulting weight-percentage histogram and cumulative distribution curve plotted on the phi scale, along with computed sorting and skewness statistics.

💡 Did You Know?

Loess deposits, the exceptionally well-sorted windblown silt that underlies some of the world's most fertile farmland, can travel hundreds of kilometers from their source yet still show remarkably little variation in grain size, a direct result of wind's narrow carrying capacity at any given speed.

⚙ Under the hood

Explore how sedimentologists classify particles from boulders to clay using the Wentworth scale, sort them with a sieve stack, and read transport history from the shape of a grain-size curve.

sedimentologygeologywentworth scalegrain sizesieve analysissortingearth sciencedeposition

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