← All skills

Ground-penetrating radar / 400 MHz / 24 m transect

Read the ground before we break it.

Every forty minutes a radar sled crosses Area C and resolves eighteen soil horizons, from last spring's plough line to a Bronze Age hearth 5.4 m down. We open the trench where the ground has already answered.

02 / Field budget

Same scene, tablet budget.

The crew reads this section on a rugged tablet at the trench edge, at 38 °C, on a battery that has to last the shift. These are the three embed knobs we turn — change them and watch what the scene actually costs.

Preview · lazy-loaded—
Render scale data-us-scale
DPI cap data-us-dpi
FPS cap data-us-fps
Measured
— fps
Pixels / second
—

03 / Section drawing

Eighteen horizons, top to bottom.

What each band in the scene is, as logged by the site supervisor. Targets are the radar returns the trench is being laid out to hit.

  1. L01Topsoil & plough zoneModern0.0–0.3 m
  2. L02Hill-wash colluviumOttoman0.3–0.6 m
  3. L03Roof-collapse debrisLate Byzantine0.6–0.9 m
  4. L04Lime-plaster floorByzantine0.9–1.2 m
  5. L05Ash lensByzantine1.2–1.5 m
  6. L06Sherd-rich fillRoman1.5–1.8 m
  7. L07Cobbled streetC-03Roman1.8–2.1 m
  8. L08Destruction burnHellenistic2.1–2.4 m
  9. L09Mudbrick meltPersian2.4–2.7 m
  10. L10Storage-pit fillC-11Iron II2.7–3.0 m
  11. L11Beaten-earth floorIron II3.0–3.3 m
  12. L12Wall-footing horizonC-07Iron I3.3–3.6 m
  13. L13Silt washLate Bronze3.6–3.9 m
  14. L14Kiln wasteLate Bronze3.9–4.2 m
  15. L15Courtyard surfaceMiddle Bronze4.2–4.5 m
  16. L16Rampart fillC-14Middle Bronze4.5–4.8 m
  17. L17Hearth sequenceEarly Bronze4.8–5.1 m
  18. L18Sterile clayNatural5.1–5.4 m

04 / How the scene is embedded

01

Give the container a size

The hero is 100svh and the field preview is locked to 16:10. A scene dropped into a zero-height div renders nothing and throws nothing.

02

Two scenes, not twelve

Browsers cap WebGL contexts around sixteen. This page runs two, and the second one is not created until you scroll near it.

03

Spend pixels where they land

The hero ships at scale 0.75, DPI capped at 1.25 and 45 fps. On a field tablet in the sun, nobody sees the difference — the battery does.

04

Fall back to the drawing

Without WebGL the section is a static strata gradient, and every number on the page still reads. The canvas is decoration; the record is the text.