Source note: Local copy of a Summer Into AI 2026 submission originally published on Substack. Screenshots, video, and audio found in the post body are mirrored locally when publicly accessible; profile and avatar images are intentionally not copied. Read the canonical post.
The U.S. government runs thousands of sensors over this country every minute — rivers, earthquakes, wildfires, the spread of disease, the glow of 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.
Spin the globe. Flip on a living layer and watch it come alive:
💧 ~9,000 river gauges reporting their flow right now, live from the USGS
🦇 the white-nose bat plague crawling across the caves of America, winter by winter
🔥 the current drought belt · 🌿 endangered-species habitat
🌋 every earthquake of the last month (the Ring of Fire lights up on its own) · 🏔️ volcanoes · 🔥 active wildfires burning right now
🌀 a century of hurricane tracks · 🌪️ 36,000 tornadoes since 1950 · 🏞️ every National Park
🌌 the live aurora forecast, straight from NOAA’s space-weather satellites
It’s a real-time day/night Earth — sunlit on one side, city lights glowing on the dark side. There’s a ⏳ time-machine to scrub a century of storms and quakes; “fly to your home” to see your local river’s flow and whether white-nose reached you; a “right now” ticker (the biggest quake on Earth today, the highest-flowing river in the country, the % of the US in drought); and a one-click cinematic tour that flies you through the whole thing.
Every single point is real, live, public federal data — nothing invented, nothing decorative. USGS, USFWS, NOAA, NIFC, the National Park Service. (Sources are listed right in the app.)
Why I built it. The theme this week was go get that ‘murica data — and I wanted to make the case that the most punk 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 nobody opens. I put it all on one globe.
A nod to a competitor. Kyle Sebeysten shipped a genuinely ambitious 3-D build last week (”Boomtown”) — it’s what made me stop stacking small things and go big on one complete project instead. It swung huge; I tried to swing just as hard and land it. Thanks for raising the bar, Kyle. And thanks to Eric for the Data.Punk theme — “go get that ‘murica data” is exactly the push this needed.
This one’s for Natasha — who loves this planet and the small wild things on it, and taught me to look closer. 🌎
Come spin the Earth (it all runs in your browser, pulling the federal feeds live):
▶️ Live: https://myles-mf.github.io/summer-into-ai-2026/week-3/biosphere/
💾 Source (one file + a data sidecar): https://github.com/myles-mf/summer-into-ai-2026/tree/main/week-3/biosphere
🗂️ Everything I’ve built for the contest: https://myles-mf.github.io/summer-into-ai-2026/
Also written up on my site: https://merlinforge.com/blog/biosphere-week-3/
Original source
Canonical Substack URL: https://merlinforge.substack.com/p/biosphere-a-living-3-d-earth-built.