TITLE Core 7B — Eight Hundred Metres of Winter PROMPT A scroll-driven story: the reader descends an ice core drilled on an invented ice cap ("Halvard Dome, core 7B"), from fresh snow at the surface to bedrock 800 metres down. The page is one tall, continuous vertical cylinder of ice running down the centre-left of a white laboratory-clean layout, with annotations pinned beside it like a core-logging sheet. Clearly fictional expedition data, but the science described is generic and true: annual layers thin with depth, firn compacts to ice, ash bands mark eruptions, bubbles hold old air, dust marks cold dry periods. Mood: clinical, quiet, vast. Palette: paper white #F7FBFD, ice pale #DCEAF2, glacier blue-grey #9DBBD0, deep navy ink #17324A, a single warm accent, ash/annotation orange-red #E4572E. Light page; the core itself gets subtly bluer and clearer with depth, and the page background cools by a few percent as you go down. Typography: tiny refined technical type. A monospace (Menlo/Consolas/Courier) for depths, ages and sample IDs; a clean grotesk (Helvetica/Arial) light weight for annotations; one enormous thin numeral: the current depth in metres, fixed in the margin, drawn as custom hairline digits and counting as you scroll (e.g. "412.6 m") with the estimated age below it ("≈ 5,100 years before drilling"), the current zone name and the local annual-layer thickness. Title at the top in wide-tracked caps: "CORE 7B" with a subtitle "Eight hundred metres of winter, read from the top". The core: drawn on canvas (or layered SVG) as a cylinder with soft side shading and a specular strip; inside, procedurally generated annual layers (thick and snowy-white near the top, compressing to hair-thin bands), firn granularity that fades out at about 70 m ("pore close-off"), scattered bubbles that shrink and elongate with depth and vanish into clathrate below ~600 m, dust bands, three dark ash layers, a melt layer ("one warm summer"), a brittle zone with fracture lines, and gravel-laden basal ice above brown bedrock. A depth ruler runs alongside with ticks every metre and labels every 10 m. Sticky side panel: three tiny live strip charts (isotope temperature proxy, dust, trapped CO2-like trace) whose current position follows the scroll, generated from smooth noise. Story beats as annotation cards connected to the core by thin leader lines (each appears with a line drawing itself, not a fade-up): the surface camp and last summer's snow; a layer the team could date by a known ash band; "the year without a summer" melt layer; the transition into ice-age ice where dust thickens; and field-log entries scattered down the core, ending with the last drill run, written by the invented glaciologist Dr. Ingrid Solheim-Okafor ("Day 41. The drill came up smelling of nothing, which is what twelve thousand years smells like."). Signature moment: tap or click any section of the core and it is "sampled": a thin disc is cut out and slides sideways into a light-box inset where it is shown in cross-polarised light: a mosaic of crystal grains in shifting pastel interference colours (Voronoi cells that recolour as the virtual polariser rotates), larger grains the deeper the sample, while bubbles released from the cut rise up the page and pop. On wide screens the light-box lives in the sticky side panel and one demonstration disc is cut automatically at the end of the entrance; on phones it opens as a sheet above a bottom bar that carries the depth numeral and the strip charts. Each cut leaves a visible gap and a sample tag on the core. Also: a drill-depth minimap at the right edge shows where you are in the 800 m and lets you jump. Small extra earth tones (a muted tan for dust, brown for basal debris and bedrock) are allowed beside the palette. An optional sound switch, off by default, adds a saw tick and bubble pops. Entrance: the drill tower in thin line art at the top, and the first metre of core extrudes downward. Reduced motion: no rising bubbles, static crystal mosaic. DESCRIPTION A white, laboratory-quiet logging sheet built around a single continuous ice core. The reader scrolls from a line-art drill tower and summit camp at the snow surface down through 800 metres of procedurally generated ice: snowy, visibly banded firn; bubbly ice; a fractured brittle zone; glass-clear clathrate ice; dusty ice-age ice; gravel-laden basal ice; and finally brown bedrock. An enormous hairline depth numeral in the margin counts every tenth of a metre against an orange reading line, with an estimated age beneath it, while annotation cards and field-log entries by Dr. Ingrid Solheim-Okafor are pinned to exact depths by leader lines that draw themselves. Three live traces, a thin-section light-box and a depth minimap stay in view; the page itself cools slightly with depth. Any point of the core can be cut: a disc slides out, turns face-on and lands in the light-box as a mosaic of crystal grains under rotating crossed polarisers, while the air released from the cut bubbles up the page. VISUAL TECHNIQUES - Canvas core rendered in cached tiles from a depth-to-age model: per-row annual layering that thins with depth, firn grain, bubbles that shrink and elongate, dust and ash bands, a melt layer, fractures, basal debris and bedrock - Column-wise warp that sags every layer into an arc, plus source-atop side shading and a specular strip, so the flat strata read as a cylinder - Custom hairline numerals drawn as SVG stroke paths for the giant depth counter - Voronoi crystal mosaic computed per sample (best-candidate sites, grid-accelerated nearest and second-nearest search, domain-warped boundaries) and recoloured every frame from each grain's extinction angle under a rotating polariser - Thin-section flight animated with the Web Animations API: an edge-on disc slides out of the core, opens to a circle and scales into the light-box - Rising, wobbling, popping bubbles as individually keyframed elements - Leader lines, card rules and text revealed by stroke-dash drawing and clip-path wipes rather than fades - SVG line-art drill tower and camp that draw themselves, followed by the core extruding downward - Three strip charts generated from smooth value noise, with the travelled part inked and a cursor following the scroll - Minimap strip sampled from the same core colour model, with ash bands and sample marks - Page background colour interpolated cooler with depth through a CSS custom property - Optional synthesized sound (filtered noise saw tick, pitched bubble pops) INTERACTION MODEL Scrolling descends the core: the depth numeral, age estimate, zone label, layer thickness, strip-chart cursors, minimap thumb and background tone all follow the orange reading line. Annotation cards draw in as they enter view. Hovering the core shows a dashed cut line with its depth; tapping or clicking the core (or pressing the "Cut at the reading line" button, which is keyboard-operable) saws out a disc that leaves a tagged gap, flies to the light-box and appears as a crystal mosaic while bubbles rise from the cut and pop. The mosaic's polariser turns on its own and can be dragged or stepped with arrow keys; grains are larger the deeper the sample, and bubbles, dust or debris appear in the section according to depth. The minimap at the right edge can be clicked, dragged or driven with arrow, Page and Home/End keys to jump anywhere in the 800 metres, and a button at bedrock winches back to the surface. A sound switch, off by default, enables the saw and bubble sounds. With reduced motion, the entrance, disc flight and rising bubbles are skipped and the mosaic is static unless turned by hand.