Posts tagged geography
One of the ways to create a major mountain range is a process called subduction. Here, heavy oceanic rock sinks beneath the lighter continental rock. The result--coastal mountain ranges like th...
So in many a fantasy world mountains, or in some cases a particular mountain that play an important role in the story. Maybe it's the seat of the gods or hosts a hidden Shangri La, you get the i...
So, my climates are extreme due to a 31.1 degree axial tilt. The maps provided show a climate classification system based on prevailing winds and elevation. Based on Reddit user u/shagomir's Plane...
I want to write a science fiction book on a planet mostly covered by ocean, but I also want to incorporate trains into my story. However, it seems that with advances in ship and plane technology, t...
Can humans live on an Earth-like planet where the only difference is that the surface is ~50% water, instead of the ~75% of now? That is, paleolithic humans... And the new land area hosts the sam...
Okay, now this question is a bit random. But, I'm planning for a possible book project about a 2019 expedition to an undiscovered island. The island is near the northern tip of the Ninetyeast Ridg...
I've been wondering about insular dwarfism, and would like to know if it only affects certain animals (Since some animals grow larger upon colonizing an island, often due to the absence of predator...
I've tried researching this question myself, but the only data I can find is over huge timescales, like situations where the continents have reformed back into a Neo-Pangea. I'm not looking for an...
I've been mulling over an idea for my preferred RPG setting, and I wanted to check if anyone knows the following: Is it possible for a river to flow underground for miles, and then suddenly be put...
After I reworked my map, I have a big plain (roughly 1165500 square miles). Can I still credibly divide the plain into different kingdoms and cultures or would a big empire with few cultures inevit...
In the world I'm building, there is a race of people whose main shtick is that they can detect the magnetic fields of their planet and use them to navigate. In one of their cultures, the people are...
What could cause the continents to drift much faster than is today. I mean, much faster. Let's say it should take about 1-2 million years from this to this
In my world, humanoid races are an afterthought added by the gods only after they'd spent millennia treating the world as their personal canvas, designing it however they found most interesting. Th...
I'm still fiddling with my map, and I got to thinking about continental drift. My world has two large large continents and a couple of other notable landmasses between the size of Iceland and Austr...
So, I've got a planet that's basically a junkyard. It's just one big junkyard. People from various space-faring societies dump all the crap there that they don't want to deal with. Derelict spacesh...
1 degree of latitude = 96.57 km. Equirectangular projections. (Yes, I need to revise the polar regions to make sure they don't get squished.) Obliquity of Jasmi: +31.1 degrees. Radius of Jasm...
I am making a science fiction computer game where you can travel between planets. I would like the planets all to have some kind of differing materials. Now I have no idea about which kind of "mate...
How much TNT do you need to blow up Mount Everest? Is this even possible and can mankind survive a huge explosion like this? Or would the whole world be covered with dust? And if you can survive ...
In this world, the continents never split off from each other. They stayed connected into the one giant landmass called Pangea. Humanity developed on this supercontinent, separated by landmarks ins...
In this scenario, I've done the following changes to the western United States. 1) Only the Rockies stand firm, so no Sierra Nevada or Coast Range. 2) The coastline has altered as though 75 met...
BACKGROUND So I was working on a map, when I suddenly realized that despite the many helpful tutorials on this site I have very little idea what I'm doing. I thought it might be a good idea to put...
Let's suppose that there is a canyon, several hundred kilometers in length, stretching from Leipzig to Geneva and reaching the depth of 30 kilometers. It is up to 60 kilometers wide, cutting throug...
I inherited a worldbuilding project, and the former authors liked some things that seem unrealistic. One of them is that one of the world's biggests rivers splits into two other rivers some 300-400...
Purely geography only. I'll break down into points. What I'm giving you below is just to narrow down the possibility, but otherwise, quite arbitrary. Assuming a large archipelago of islands exist...
My fantasy world consists of a flat plane, with the sun affixed to a point directly over the main continent. This sun powers down to create night conditions, and then powers up again in the morning...
The planet in question is this one. Approximately three quarters the size and half the gravity of Earth, an atmosphere 25% as dense as the Terran one which mainly consists of Nitrogen with small pe...
I was told to post this question separately, so here it is. I need help with the geography and climate of my map. Blue circles are ports Gray circles are cities That one brown circle is a town ...
I'm thinking of using this as a method of separating a planet's technological and cultural evolution, then having a sudden clash as the more advanced one becoming able to cross the storm belt. This...
Hello everyone, I finally forced myself to sit and draw a landmass. Is pic-related a somewhat realistic representation of a landmass? The dot is a meeting point of 3 tectonic plates (the less vis...
I'm making a continent with a large valley, "the Great Valley is like a wound in the continent". Swamps are the dominant biome in this valley. It is surrounded by cliffs and inside of it I want the...
So imagine you're looking at the world map. More specifically, the left half (when the world map is cut along a vertical line, so the half stretches from the left edge of a current world map to a l...
I've come up with an idea of building a fantastical continent inspired by the climates of Scandinavia. It will be shaped similar to a crescent, and based on two tectonic plates that go over each o...
Aliens build their city on Earth in such a way that it covers the entire planet but leaves the surface of the planet (including human cities) intact. This is possible since they built their alien ...
If you have ever watched Tintin: Or played Minecraft: Then you may have dreamed, as I have, of an ecosystem dominated by Fungal life. As part of a Hard Sci-Fi RPG I'm running, I'd like one of th...
There's a human settlement at the north pole of the moon large enough to sustain expansion outwards for say 100 km in all directions. Humans like to think in terms of four principal cardinal direc...
I am considering setting my next D&D campaign on an earthlike but small planet. By "small," I am imagining a world that still feels vast, yet is circumnavigable over land and/or water with low ...
I am designing the geography of a lake in which two rivers flow. Should it have a river flowing from it to the sea or vice versa?
If you want to tell a story of a lonely island on earth, isolated from the rest of the civilization, how many years do you have to go back to be realistic? I think about a story about 350 people w...
I'm actually trying to create an alien ecosystem, so changing orbits, what's exhibiting tidal forces and the geography and such is welcome if needed. I also wonder how stable a setup with dramatic ...
For a long, long, long time I have had a concept of a world that exists on the inside of a hallowed-out sphere. The basic construction of the world is like this: It is a large world, at the cent...
I'm looking to found a new country on a real-to-life Earth, and I need somewhere to put it. The country is going to be anywhere from 100 to 1000 square miles (250 to 2500 square km) in size. Assume...
Story starts out about 100 years from now. While in orbit around Earth preparing for an interstellar mission, our spacecraft encounters some hand-wavey spacetime anomaly such that we're still in o...
I've heard that bodies of water boasting high salinities tend to turn red due to seasonal algae blooms. I have a river in a fantasy setting I'm working on that's blood red year-round, and I want to...
I am currently creating a world from scratch, and while I have a map, I still need to figure out distribution of natural resources. For resources like fossil fuels, while many do appear in deserts...
In my Pathfinder RPG campaign setting I have two continents separated by an isthmus. An artificial canyon carved through the isthmus from one ocean to another divides the continents. The canyon i...
I'm coming up with ideas for locations in my sci-fi story and I thought of an interesting one. Here's the scenario: A planet has a watery ocean sitting on heated bedrock. Temperatures range from 5...
Could a structure similar to that shown in the image below inspired by Roger Dean's "Close to the edge" actually exist in nature? If not could it be constructed artificially and if so how? Assume t...
Let us take an earthlike planet. Approximately same radius, atmosphere and climate. Now let us create an approximately circular, paleovolcanic mountain approximately 30 kilometers in height and 15...
Is there a necessary relation between orbital period and the time of precession? In the case of Earth, the orbital period is one year, while a complete precession cycle takes thousands of years. Is...
Imagine that a group of Inuits from Greenland settled in Antarctica; let's say on the Antarctic peninsula, if there is no better place in Antarctica. Could they survive there with their traditiona...
