the.com/biome
a planet's mood ring, painted by rain, sun, and sheer geographic stubbornness
means A large community of plants and animals shaped by a region's climate, like a desert, rainforest, or tundra.
from A 20th-century coinage stitched from Greek bios, "life," plus the suffix -ome, which signals a whole body or collective mass — the same -ome that gives us genome and biome's smaller cousins. So a biome is, quite literally, "the whole mass of life" in a place, named by ecologists who needed a word for nature scaled up to the size of a landscape.
- big five
- Earth has roughly five major biome types
- underwater too
- Oceans hold biomes most maps ignore
- your gut
- The microbiome is a biome inside you
- climate-drawn
- Temperature and rainfall sketch every boundary
- shifting lines
- Warming planet redraws biome maps yearly
amazon rainforest — tropical rainforest spanning 5.5 million km² across 9 countries, primarily brazil
sahara desert — hot desert covering 9 million km² across north africa from atlantic to red sea
siberian taiga — boreal forest stretching 13.7 million km² across russia, the largest forest biome on earth
great barrier reef — coral reef system spanning 2,300 km along australia's northeast coast