Posts tagged environment
I live in northeastern Nebraska, and I had seen more than enough of tornadoes in my lifetime. So in an alternate Earth, it is my hope to make some changes that would save my home from being anothe...
The planet in question is Earth-like in size and composition and orbits a Sun-like star. Its atmosphere is less than 5% Oxygen and plants (lichens, some grass and river vegetation) have started col...
In this alternate Earth, there is a clear ecological distinction between trees depending on altitude. The lowlands are exclusive to broad-leaved deciduous trees while conifers can be found only on...
I know that rivers do not usually split but they can. e.g. It can occur due the glacial shift. Are there any other ways that this could happen? And if it did would one river become dominant a ...
The mountains of the American West have some major differences. For starters, only the Rockies stand firm"”no Coast Range, no Grand Canyon and most certainly no Sierra Nevada. The Rockies on Great ...
In my world, a population of about a billion people lives in an underground cave that has growing grass, a forest of trees, an immensely deep lake to allow for rain to flow through the water cycle,...
The setting is a moon-sized body with solid surface, thick (but mostly transparent) atmosphere and magnetosphere. But most heat from the space is supplied with relativistic charged particles impact...
I have an exomoon that orbits close enough to its planet that it has notable geological activity. I would like to limit active volcanoes/geysers/lava lakes/etc. to at most, a couple dozen areas on ...
Time period is renaissance, with the most powerful culture being in a area geographically similar to the middle east. So a cleric was trying to combat a drought in his kingdom using the power of a ...
This is based on the notion of adaptive radiation, a process in which organisms diversify rapidly from an ancestral species into a multitude of new forms, particularly when a change in the environm...
*By life, I mean something more complex than microorganisms. Something closer to what we have on Earth. similar to this question: Is it possible for complex life to evolve on planets without oxyg...
I am trying to build a world which has a bit larger gravity force than earth, 1.25g. And I was wondering which impact could this have on its geology and life evolution. I think that with a higher ...
Imagine the population of our planet is given free (almost) and unlimited energy. What kind of technologies would go mainstream which are not feasible today due to prohibitively high energy requir...
I drew a little map of a continent, but there is one area that I'm not sure about; the climate. As for the location of this map, remove North America and replace it with this map. The northernmost ...
As usual, another interesting scientific question, taken from /r/worldbuilding. Would it mean any difference for a desert, where the amount of threatened objects is so low? Or would it form the ge...
Details: Would it be possible to have a mountain spring that only flows occasionally, perhaps only for a few days, following moderate rainfall? The spring water would feed into an otherwise stagn...
Can anyone think of a reasonable man-made or natural disaster that would split a large volcanic island into smaller parts, mostly stone cliff faces, and destroy most of the vegetation? I'd like t...
I've posted a previous question similar to this in the way that it is of my WIP web-comic. The planet my friend and I have designed is strange as she wanted to create either a permanently dark plan...
A"¦ well, dream"¦ of mine: what if smoking suddenly, overnight, became immediately lethal? To be more specific, this is about "active" smoking; bystanders aren't affected. To make things more inte...
Meaning, cause a seemingly normal winter to suddenly take a turn within hours or a day/two into a completely frozen territory? From what I've read, abrupt climate change happens from ocean currents...
This post-apocalyptic environment, as narrated in the book, depicts a world where most if not all animal life has been abruptly killed, and similarly most vegetation burned out. After the disaster,...
The sun inexplicably ceases to give light. It's still there and continues to have a gravitational pull keeping us in orbit. The solar system continues to operate as normal, but the sun has gone dar...
I know there are different types and levels of radiation with different affects. I read about some positive affects of ionizing radiation like : Useful for imaging parts of the body and other obj...
So I'm writing a story on a population of lizardmen who have subdued all the human population. Since lizards spend lots of their time soaking in the sun, I'm not sure how should I go for the night...
Lets assume a city exists underground, either in natural caves or synthetic tunnels. Are there any food sources underground, and what kind of population can they support?
I have a planet that I want to have a greenish atmosphere. I've heard in a few places that chlorine gas has the potential to make the atmosphere greenish, but also to kill humans. So, the question ...
Characteristics: has close to 80.000km in diameter The atmosphere is composed of: -30% hydrogen (cold gas planets have hydrogen but it makes sense it exists in a rocky planet?) -20% oxygen -...
This is inspired by What single element could destroy the world?. Injecting sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere has been proposed as a mechanism to relieve the symptoms of global warming by creatin...
You have a planet about the size of Earth. It needs to be continually dark, with just the slightest bit of light. Or no light at all. It makes little difference to the aliens that live there. But, ...
For my current purposes, assume we have two planets identical to earth. So, could two of these planets form a stable binary system, and still be close enough to see the green foliage on the surface...
Would a world be able to sustain a constant low pressure area such that there would be a constant wind from one side to the other? Imagine that on one side of the world is a desert with some rock...
I know it's been proven false in our world, but what is the most plausible mechanism by which an Open Polar Sea could form and persist? I don't mean all the ice melting, but an open sea as it was ...
In our universe, the energy of the sun generates heat and light. This helps keep the earth warm enough for life and drives much of the earth's climate. Warmth slowly bleeds off into the coldness of...
In a story I am (at least attempting) to write, I plan to have Earth's atmosphere become unlivable by humans. I assume that Earth's atmosphere could not be ignited by a solar flare event, because i...
Imagine a world that reaches the end of its resources in silicon, petrol, coal, metals... everything that allows for conventional technology "” even before it has found a way over it (renewable ene...
This is for a novel I'm writing. The basic premise is that massive networks of mycelium running under the soil combine to form a decentralised intelligence that has been managing life and condition...
Supposing a roughly mars sized planet, how little surface water would need to exist to sustain a population of a size similar to pre-industrial earth (say 750 million?) The situation is somewhat u...
What problems would perpetual fog cause to a country roughly the size and environment of Ireland? The country has all modern infrastructure such as power plants, roads, factories, hospitals, etc. ...
Are there realistic circumstances that a planet would be accelerated (either artificially or naturally) to the speed at which relic radiation becomes so blue-shifted that the planet is illuminated ...
Question 2 of Semiliquid atmosphere - Is my premise/conclusions correct; and will it get the result I want? Atmospheric effects - As mentioned before, I prefer it to be visually very similar to o...
For my Science-Fantasy WIP I am considering using a single artificial planet (roughly the size of a Dyson Sphere) and its moons (of which only three are large enough to exert any real influence) as...
Earth in this scenario still rotates once every 24 hours, and the temperate zone still has four seasons, each one lasting three months. But in this scenario, a temperate summer has the sun shining...
Now I know that there are limits technically on size of plants as seen in this post, but what I want to know is what limits a plants speed? I'm guessing it has to do with the soil, but is that all...
I'm currently heavily revising a story which is largely set on a habitable but not exactly hospitable moon of a gas giant orbiting on the outer edge (or just beyond) of the habitable zone around a ...
Can a planet possess more than one ozone layer? Can multiple ozone layers cause more harm? If one ozone layer had a hole, would the other(s) act like a backup shield to harmful rays from a star? As...
For my WIP's setting I'm using a variation of the Sky World concept. The cosmos looks very similar to the Astral Sea. The shape of the cosmos akin to a torus and filled with a silvery ether a thin...
Imagine that the oxygen disappears from earth's atmosphere for some 10 seconds completely. what would be the casualties it would cause, what would be the climatic changes and other changes it would...
One of the theories behind the extinction of the dinosaurs is the eruption of one or a series of volcanoes. Supposedly the ash expelled by these eruptions blocked out the sun, killing plants and th...
For this question lets take a trip to Slyo Dacas: Slyo Dacas (sil-yo-dak-iss) is a world roughly the same size of Earth with a decent magnetic field and no moons. The world is a bit drier than...
How do you go about boosting an already-habitable planet's habitability? I want to maximize biomass, hopefully cover the whole planet surface in luxuriant jungles and forests, brimming with insects...
