Posts tagged environment
This one is rather straightforward. A character falls into a magically-induced coma for about 10,000 years and then wakes up to find the world around him different in quite a few ways. There's not ...
I have been slowly losing my mind trying to build a somewhat realistic climate map for a fantasy world I'm building for my book. A geographer I am not... I modeled the climate zones and such after ...
I am working on a planet that has insignificant (almost 0 degrees) tilt, no moon, rotates twice as fast as Earth. I intend to create quite an exotic "biome", so to speak, in a subtropical desert z...
I'm picturing a world without oceans. I'm not after Arrakis; I want a quite lush surface. I'd like no surface water at all, but I'm concerned that makes evolution impossible. (I imagined using chem...
I've just come here for some help drawing a map for this fictional planet where two roughly similar planets have been smushed into kind of pear shape like this: So this planet spins on an axis w...
If a three-month dark period was a normal, recurring, part of a 15-month calendar, and plants had evolved to be bio-luminescent, could they survive? Would only some survive and, if so, would it be ...
How does inverting global temperatures affect climate? Here exists a fantasy world similar to earth in all important ways. Except, however, that global temperatures have been flipped; it is colde...
On Earth, rivers are possible because rain and snow deposit water in high places. That water then forms rivers when flowing to lower places. Would it be possible to have the phenomena of rivers fl...
In my story, there is a civilization living in the Amazon rainforest. They need some time of mount that is adapted to the forest. I don't think horses can survive by themselves in there, so I was t...
Alright, so I've been meaning to write out a planet with golden/yellow fields and a violet / purple ocean. What I was thinking about is having the water of this world is so clean and nourishing th...
I'm talking about this sort of liquid sand: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=My4RA5I0FKs "Desert-as-sea-analog" is present in many media, but often they lean heavily into fantasy, and it seems not ...
(I'm new here, so I apologize in advance if I do something wrong) TL;DR of what I'm looking for: A substance (natural or artificial) that... can be suspended in an atmosphere is harmful to bre...
Please assume the following: There is a item on the ground and I want nothing but bare earth touching it. I cannot move the item myself. The item is impervious to fire. I cannot afford to guar...
I'm trying to think of a scientifically plausible reason for humanity to be forced to abandon earth that would leave animals and plants largely untouched. Is there any natural disaster that would h...
Imagine a planet of roughly the same size as Earth with the same amount of land, the same atmosphere and the same proportion of water (other planetary parameters may vary from Earth like) that has ...
In my story I've devised lore where Greenland becomes a US territory, and they begin populating the region. It initially just served as the hub for numerous military bases and airbases, but eventua...
I was thinking about this world with different ancient factions on war. The war caused both of them and most life on the planet to die, I was thinking about one of the moons getting shattered as a ...
In a comment to a recent question, it was pointed out that Biosphere II failed in part because too much CO2 was absorbed by the concrete, leaving insufficient oxygen in available CO2 to be released...
"Tree" is (apparently) not a very well defined term as far as scientific classifications are concerned, so I'll put my own restrictions on it for this question: Typical healthy adult specimens mu...
When one hears the name "Beringia", we most often think the land bridge that formed as a result of a drop in sea levels during the Pleistocene, resulting in a connection between Alaska and Russia. ...
A generation spaceship (a spaceship designed for multiple generations of humans to live in) could sail through the galaxy for hundreds of years before finding another planet, let alone a planet wit...
I have a planet circling an M-Class star (M3/M4). I'm trying to figure out what the effects of flaring on the planet's biosphere might be. Background: As some of you may know, M-class stars are re...
I recently came by the many questions of scaling creatures and the square-cube law in real world physics right here, and it piqued my interest a bit to make this question. Think of it as an exercis...
So this is a small map of all the continents on the small planet of Parsas Decem. As far as most of the rivers go, I've got it figured out. What I'm wondering is, can salt water flowing in from t...
On one of the continents in one of my fantasy worlds, I have a kingdom. The kingdom is comprised of two different geographical regions, a steppeland area in the kingdom's north and a desert region ...
I've been experimenting with a fantasy world that is flat, with the sun fixed in place over the centre. The day-night cycle is provided by the sun dimming and then brightening again. Most of the re...
The situation I'm considering is as follows: A large research vessel with a crew of about 100-200 attempts to land on a potentially habitable planet, but something goes wrong during the descent. A...
Hydrothermal vents are thought to exist on Europa. On Earth, these vents are surrounded by all manner of freakish and bizarre looking creatures, mainly various worms, crabs and octopodes. Europa'...
A universe-destroying parasite is set loose, and basically earth is placed under magical quarantine. (Think of it like the world is wrapped in magical cellophane.) My question is, how would earth's...
In my part of this (Earth-like) world, there is a stable community of completely isolated pre-industrial humans, numbering perhaps 1,800. They live at an altitude of (at least) 25,000 feet (7620 m...
So I'm creating a world where the ground is mainly made of different rocks and stone in most areas - soil is sparse. Could trees and plant life grow on the stone ground if a water source is nearby...
Let's say a human were to live most of his life in a 200 G environment but then suddenly enter a 1 g environment, What would be the effects to his body and will this give him the ability to carry l...
I've got a generally earthlike planet, but my goal is to make radiation exposure in the polar regions a much larger hazard than it is on Earth, while not being an issue in other regions. Nothing im...
(First post on StackExchange, hello world!) The project that I'm currently working on involves a Binary Planet system, both with life, although I'm only focusing on one. This planet has a climate ...
I am writing a theory for a game that is in an apocalypse. An asteroid is heading for earth and will crash into the earth regardless in this theory. It is 1km in size but due to the YORP effect it ...
I'm not asking about an exotic species in the modern world we know all too well the havoc that can be caused by the introduction of an alien species into an existing ecosystem. I want to know if a ...
Let's say we have the technology to produce all of the human food in factories without the need for land (i.e. Solarfood, Memphis Meats). Right now, there is about 50% of all habitable land use for...
Could a moon or planet with otherwise no atmosphere maintain gas pockets in sufficiently deep craters, and could it be habitable by humans without pressure or space suits? I found this similar que...
As the title says. I need to have at least 3-5 habitable Earth-gravity worlds (preferably with atmosphere, nitrogen oxygen) as many smaller, lifeless moons as possible, and a planetary ring. (i.e. ...
Are there any chemical elements dangerous to fungus/mushrooms that wouldn't threaten the human species. The chemical elements I'm looking for would be in the periodic table of elements. It doesn...
I have a cave that is ravine like and stretches approximately one kilometer down into the Earth. Let's assume that the cave has a clear, crystalline roof allowing some light in. Is there any sort...
There's been a few questions about making big bugs before and the consensus in they can't get much bigger than 3ft or so (which in reality is still huge). Catch is, you need quite a bit of extra ox...
The Great Red Spot on Jupiter and the numerous Great White Spots on Saturn are storm systems that encircle the globes and last for decades, centuries in Jupiter's case. These are formed on Gas Gian...
Earth has stopped rotating. Maybe Superman started flying around the Earth backwards to turn back time, but hit a wall of kryptonite just when the Earth stopped rotating. Or Stupendous Man hit the ...
My setting takes place on a planet that has a very high level of radiation because of reasons unknown to the population. This factor or group of factors are not man-made, but due to some change in ...
So the world has been destroyed. Pick your poison. We have probably 300 different scenarios lying around here somewhere. What's Left: The world is a desolate wasteland, dry and crispy and barr...
As you look at the properties of the atmosphere as you scale up or down, things get weirder and weirder. One good example is the fairyfly and its environment. Fairyflies are so small that at their ...
The Arctic ice cap is melting away soon. Some (probably misguided) ecoactivists think it would be a good idea to safeguard certain indigenous species of the North Polar region (especially mammals) ...
Earthlings, I live on a world where most places on my planet has four seasons, just like yours does. We also have one sun and one moon, presumably. It's been not even a year since I came of age (2...
Larry Niven wrote a novel called The Integral Trees, which was followed by a sequel The Smoke Ring. This is Wikipedia's synopsis of the setting: The story occurs around the fictional neutron st...
