Posts tagged geography
The setting: A planet with two main landmasses, each one's center located more or less at each pole of the planet. Liquid water ocean in between them, wrapping fully, if not directly (due to the ...
I am trying to wrap my head around the geography of a settlement in my world. The settlement is situated along the coast, along a river roughly 500m wide with temperate mixed forests surrounding i...
We all know about Rain Shadow - And if you don't now you do - and that the inner side of a mountain as compared to the ocean would be drier. Now a worldbuiding problem going around that phenomenon...
If a chunk of land mass the size and position of Sweden took off and floated away in a straight line, exiting the atmosphere and orbiting earth, at what distance would it be visible from, let's say...
During an ice age, would it be possible for a great lake to be frozen while a relatively nearby river was still running? To help illustrate my point: Would it be possible for Lake Michigan (or par...
I've got a home-brewed D&D setting. Diamonds, in D&D, are needed for resurrection magic, so access to diamonds is literally life and death for any country with clerics capable of casting su...
My story is set in a fortress town built below a mountain, and revolves around the struggle between the witch who protects the mountain and the tyrant who seeks to plunder it for resources (think P...
If there were an absolutely terrible accident, and part of Earth's core was displaced toward the surface, making a bubble of liquid nickel and iron, what would be the major problems with this?
I would like to create a map with the help of tectonic plates. I didn't really care before. Can tectonic plates have all possible sizes and shapes? As an extreme example, could a continent the size...
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 ...
Let's assume that there is a lake that has formed from snowmelt and rainfall. The lake has never been in contact with other bodies of water. How might this lake become a complete ecosystem?
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'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...
From an answer to a previous question of mine: A planet spinning fast enough to allow geostationary orbit near the surface would result in odd side effects. Any object at rest on the equator w...
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...
I know that when some rivers (such as the Nile) flow out to sea, they break up into several smaller channels. But I was wondering about the necessary features of the land and water for it to occur.
On a world similar to Earth minus size, gravity, and a mildly different atmosphere. The weather is much more violent, causing frequent dust storms. The planet is larger than Earth and is mostly scr...
I want to start by thanking everybody in this community as your posts have been instrumental in helping me to build my world. All I am asking for is a final review of the maps that I have created t...
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 world there is a village with a hot spring, the only one on the entire island. The spring emerges from a local cave which has been filled / caved in by a past civilisation, since the water i...
I was unfortunate enough to imagine an ancient setting upside down. I started out with small features and, after connecting them, got the following: cold ^ | sun...
I've written about these rocky hills with short grass, gravel, shrubs, and big boulders. At the bottom of one of the hills is a big bog. Basically I've designed some buildings to be sticking out of...
I made a map for my fictional world and it would be convenient for the story to have all of it affected by a somewhat similar climate. The map is made of several pieces of a Pangaea-like continent...
Note: this takes place in a world populated by humanoid bears, where the population density in Siberia is much higher. The northern part of Russia is taken up by a country called Medwedia. As said...
Would it be possible for huge, hundreds-of-metres-long spikes of rock, ideally slanting at an angle, to arise under natural processes? For clarity, I mean like this: Copyright Joe Jesus Ther...
This question basically boils down to this: What would be the places on a given continent where one would find mountains? I have seen maps from games, movies, board games, books etc. where it would...
Around Earth's equator, there's a band of low pressure called the Doldrums. 30 degrees north and south are bands of high pressure called the horse latitudes. Finally, there are more low-pressure ba...
To make a long story short, the previous ice age resulted in not just massive glaciers and building snow from appearing, but larger landmass as well due to most of the water being frozen from the c...
For my world I would need a really large swamp (or similar kind of wetland). It should be about 200km in diameter, which should be quite possible given a large enough flat terrain and enough rain. ...
On one (of many) of the planets that I am planning out, there are no seas. The planet is mainly composed of enormous mountains, with some deserts in between. There are no seas or large bodies of w...
In my world, there is a chain of offshore volcanoes which are the result of a smaller plate hitting a larger one. There are two to three active volcanoes. My question is: two of these volcanoes a...
Question: I'm trying to determine how large (geographically) my city will have to be to accommodate for 1 million people. I have a city that was basically formed by the gods to be fertile land wit...
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 ...
My world has a huge crater (4400 miles in diameter) on a world that's roughly earth equivalent (so a circumference of 25000 miles). The native population doesn't need to know how it was formed but...
My world has a continent in the northern hemisphere that lies primarily in the Ferrel cell where the westerly winds are. The continent is fairly large, just a tad bit smaller then than North Americ...
Building on this question "Discovery of life on Mars" Mars is habitable (40% the mass of Earth, 6.06 m/s² gravity, escape velocity of 7.88 km/s, a satellite big enough to stabilize its axis an...
My world has a city of glass found along the outskirts of a desert. I decided on this because sand can become glass and so it was a huge resource that could be used for building. However, the conc...
Is the following map fairly realistic? It is of a small continent, connected to a larger one, at a Europe like position on the globe. This is the continent in topographical map form, it also inc...
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...
I am curious as to what physical geographic features would be present on a plateau 10km above sea level. The Tibetan plateau is only 4km above sea level, so would more than doubling the height exag...
before I get into my question I wanted to thank everyone for their input in my first thread about the general principles of river drawing. I have taken your comments under consideration and began r...
I'm new here but I've been a worldbuilder for the last decade or so. I'm pretty late to the 'mapping out your country' party and I've only been at it for about 8 months, but I'm starting to see som...
The question This question has a few parts: 1. Is it possible for a river to naturally form in the shape of a spiral? 2. If not, would an artificially-formed river, in the shape of a spiral, reali...
Premises: red dwarfs tend to have violent sun storms in their early years, thus are expected to strip atmosphere of planets that may be in their habitable zones; water worlds (including planets w...
Premise: a massive organic structure sits somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean giving of an intermittent telekinetic pulse. This would presumably create a constant chain of tsunamis. What sort of abnor...
My world has a semi-nomadic people that inhabit a vast sandy desert. Underneath this desert lie the ruins of an enormous metropolis -- a city that was abandoned tens of thousands of years ago. In ...
The world is Earth, probably west coast of the USA, in the throes of severe climate disaster; major storms, earthquakes, droughts, fires and floods are the norm. I am looking for a way to suddenl...
My fantasy world is slightly larger than earth so that discovery of the continents becomes harder (about 20% surface should do it). But at the same time I want to preserve most aspects to make it l...
I have a bit of a problem. My largest dragons have a flight range of over 1000 miles, but I have another continent that is only reachable by ship significantly closer (just over 750 miles). I can't...
Basically, it's a continent that wants to be really hard to find (you can find it if you try really, really hard). For example, if you got in a ship and wanted to sail to it you wouldn't be able to...