Deep Time Games / Geology
Section two
From the Hadean crust to the water table under your feet — the ages, the minerals, the maps, the sediment, and the ground that moves.
Every game here is built on the real record: the International Chronostratigraphic Chart, the Hjulström curve, Darcy’s law, the Barrovian sequence, the Floridan aquifer. Colors follow the ICS chart throughout, so a hue is always a clue.
Stack the periods, extinctions, hominins, orogenies and sea-level events oldest-to-youngest. Sequence them, match each to its period, or flip flashcards — seven decks, mixed or by theme.
Play → Idle · clickerSink an idle borehole back to the Hadean crust at 4,600 Ma. Bank research, upgrade the rig, and log every boundary you cross.
Play → PuzzleA fence diagram across three outcrops. Trace a bed using marker beds and index fossils — and spot where it pinches out or changes rock type sideways.
Play →Name the mineral in the hand and under the microscope — hardness, streak, cleavage, and the thin-section optics that give it away. Classify igneous and metamorphic rocks, and learn the formulas and silicate structures behind them.
Play → New · economic geologyOre deposits and the processes that concentrate them, a petroleum system you can build and break, coal rank, and reserves versus resources.
Play →Read a geologic map: real topographic contours and the rule of Vs, strike-and-dip notation, folds and faults from their map patterns, plus plate boundaries and seismic waves.
Play → New · engineeringEngineering geology: read a boring log, work a slope to failure, and probe Florida’s sinkholes. Then the soil data itself — phase relationships, Atterberg limits and the plasticity chart, Kozeny–Carman permeability, and whether a contaminant will actually move.
Play →Follow a grain from outcrop to basin. The Hjulström curve, the Goldich series, Folk & Ward statistics on a real distribution, roundness against sphericity — and twelve sedimentary structures with the geometry that tells you the flow, the environment, and which way was up.
Play → SimulationWhy three regions with wildly different rainfall all ended up pumping, then where a raindrop actually goes — recharge is the leftover after evapotranspiration and runoff take their cut. Then porosity, Darcy’s law, and a well field you can over-pump until the spring runs dry.
Play → New · surface waterGauge a stream strip by strip, read a rating curve into the part nobody measured, watch a city turn a storm into a flash flood, and find out what a “100-year flood” actually means for a 30-year mortgage.
Play → New · quantitativeGeomorphology by calculation. Read the hypsometric curve, balance an isostatic root, work out why ocean depth follows the square root of seafloor age, date a fault scarp from how far it has slumped, and run back-of-the-envelope problems with the units carried.
Play → New · tectonicHow mountains are pushed up and plates bend. Thicken the crust and carve valleys to raise the peaks, link faults and test them against Coulomb failure, count earthquakes in a drowned-forest creek bank, date rockfalls with lichens, lift a flight of marine terraces, and bend a plate to find its bulge.
Play →Hop cooling crust rafts across the Hadean magma ocean, pocket ancient zircons, and dodge the bombardment — survive to the first real rock.
Play → Match-threeA match-three you can skin for minerals or dig-site finds. Line up four to forge the geologist's rock hammer or the archaeologist's trowel.
Play →Stratigraphy doesn’t stop at the base of the plow zone. The superposition, cross-cutting and correlation you use on an outcrop are the same tools an archaeologist uses on a trench wall — and the deep-time sequence you build in Order of Ages ends with the hominins. If the rock side clicks, the human side will too.