Posts tagged geography
After doing some research to find natural resources in a swamp, I found that a swamp wasn't really able to do anything beyond it being good for fish growth, as a sort of natural water and air filte...
I've heard a lot of people say that having two tidally locked planets close together would have adverse affects on both planets. I have two tidally locked planets at a distance of 16,550 miles apar...
EDIT: Question has been altered significantly in terms of design (originally having been a 'what-if'). This should (hopefully) accommodate more grounded and specific answers. Science often prefers...
How can I explain, in a believable way of course, that country borders closely resemble drainage divides? They don't always match mountain ridges, which are natural borders "“Â as are the rivers th...
Imagine a strip of land that divided the world in two, by encircling the globe, connecting the poles. I want this belt to form naturally and be a constant feature, at least for over 5000 years. A...
I am somewhat new to worldbuilding so forgive me if I am not as clear as I could be. I have created a continent, but for relate-ability sake, imagine the US and Mexico, but where the Yucatan Peni...
Definitions Hamada: A type of desert landscape consisting of high, largely barren, hard rocky plateaus, with very little sand because this has been removed by deflation. -- From Wikipedia ...
At the height of the last ice age, glaciers as thick as one mile reached as far down south in Europe as London. This is the reason why England and Wales have very little mountains, and why the ter...
A character of my story is in the following situation: He is in the middle of a forest and has lost his way out. He wants to be sure to keep straight on and not to move in a circle. He has no co...
I am creating a Pangaea type continent for a D&D series with some friends and I was wondering (since this continent will last us years) if we should add every biome to it. IE: equatorial dry/we...
My continent features a large canyon, perhaps 100 miles long and mile across. It is deep enough that descending to the bottom is dangerous and impractical. It is located primarily in an arid scrubl...
Tech level is early Rome, China, Ethiopia, etc. ~ first century BC. Unlike history, there's peace and cooperation among all the benign monarchies of the whole Earth. But it's hard to get daily co...
I am looking for a tool that can be used to create worlds with a realistic (= physically plausible) climate and surface given general terrain shape, or can at least assist in such a task. My ideal...
In my answer to my own question, Physical laws for a matter-filled universe, I detail the gross physical laws that would shape my four-spatial-dimensional matter filled universe. Given a slowly ex...
I stumbled across Vincent's answer regarding forests and deserts. He claims an elevation difference of 3,000 meters (9,800 feet) could put a forest and a desert in close proximity. That got me thin...
A world I am developing requires that only approximately one quadrasphere or quadrant (1/2 a hemisphere) of the planet be occupied. I would like the north and south extremes to be outside anything...
I want to create an inland forest on the western side of a large continent that features cenotes instead of rivers. Is this possible, and if so, how can I make it work? Any requirements for altitud...
If you've read Chronicles of Ancient Darkness, you might get the reference. In that story, the protagonists, after fulfilling their duty, decide to journey over a large mountain chain to explore t...
I have an area of my world that is essentially a large crater. It is a huge barren land surrounded by mountains. The ground is stone, then below are underground rivers, and below those are pools of...
Would it be possible for a planet to form so it has all of the landmass in only one hemisphere? By landmass, I mean all landmass that is above sea level. And human-habitability is encouraged...
I'm doing some planning for a fantasy comic and I was just wondering how the rest of the world would look if sea levels rose enough to completely submerge the U.K. Specifically I'm interested in ma...
One of the planets I am building has a very large crescent shaped continent that I want to say came about when a super continent split and the areas below sea level flooded. Could this have happend?
I have to make a map for two planets. For booth two I already have an idea about what they look like, but I don't know how to draw them. They don't need to be really clear, however they should make...
Inspired by this article on Big Think: Genius or Crazy? Pangaea Reborn, how could humanity create a new Pangaea out of our planet? From what I remember of my earth science class, the amount of en...
According to Wikipedia and this answer, the Moon is orbiting the Earth at a distance around 20 times greater than than the point where it would break up. As far as I can tell, that means in a ficti...
Once geological processes have created a landscape a number of factors come into play in order to reshape it. This includes weather and climate effects such as wind, rain and ice reshaping the terr...
This question focuses on the initial creation of landmasses. What are the processes that causes land-masses to form, and continents and islands to rise up from the sea and sink back into it? How...
Back home, the Pleistocene ice never reached farther south than New York or London. These ice ages had been coming and going for two and a half million years. On average, there was enough ice to ...
What would happen a volcano the size of Australia were to erupt? How high on the extinction-list would it rank? Would it be above the asteroid that hit Earth and killed the dinosaurs? Which known...
Let's assume a planet like ours, same size and same conditions. My characters live at approximately 60° North, in a boreal forest, with a climate much like the Nordic countries in Europe. They are...
Siberia was formed as a result of a massive hotspot volcano (Siberian Traps) ~250 million years ago (mya) and so was India ~64 mya (Deccan Traps). So, I was working on a random planet generator fo...
As a child, I was always fascinated by the propensity of water going down a drain to form a vortex. I created a world with a global ocean where there was a narrow body of land running north-south...
I have a fictional map for an Earth-like planet, with Renaissance-era humanoid populations. Also, Luna, that is, the exact same moon that we had, pre-Space-Race, is orbiting the planet. My map jus...
The Gobi Desert is what ecologists call an "interior desert" because it's too far away for water to reach. Now imagine that the Caspian Drainage Basin to the west has experienced a 75-meter rise i...
The highest point in the Ethiopian Highlands is 14,928 feet above sea level. It is here that the Nile River begins its journey to the Mediterranean. If the highlands were instead 21,737 feet abov...
Lake Eyre in Australia has an area of roughly 4,000 square miles, but the basin itself is over 450,000 square miles. If the entire basin were freshwater, how would that affect the Outback's climate?
At 29,029 feet above sea level, Mount Everest has been credited as the tallest mountain on Earth. The only problem is that Mauna Kea, Hawaii's highest point, is 33,500 feet tall from its peak at 4...
In one of my Alternate Earths, I have made the following changes to Africa: 1) Re-angle the mainland (meaning Madagascar stays right where it is) to the point that the Mediterranean is connected ...
Currently, the distance between Australia and Antarctica is a rough estimate of 4500 miles. But if that number were cut by half, what would Australia's climate and ecology be?
Today's Mediterranean Sea is just a shadow of its former self, the Tethys. In an alternate scenario, I have rearranged the African mainland to an angle that turns Gibraltar from a strait into an i...
I was wondering if planets die after a certain amount of time, perhaps because of decay? If this is the case, how do they die and how long does it take? Do they implode? Explode or perhaps just f...
I'm trying to figure out if a certain city, with these characteristics, is possible, geographically: Assume the city's the size of Renaissance London... With Renaissance London technology Doesn't...
I'm currently working on fantasy setting with a strong focus on sea based adventures. To try and make the setting clearly different from Earth I thought I make large landmasses virtually unheard of...
In Dungeons and Dragons lore, there exists a construct called the cosmos used to define a variety of planes of existence. One of these is the Material Plane, on which our normal reality is found. ...
I am developing a world on this continent: To know the world, I have to know how the weather works. Inside the white line is the continent. The blue arrows denote the flow of water. Up is north,...
In my very lengthy story in the near future, there are some great 'Modern Marvels'. The next one I'm going to introduce might not be feasible, but if it is, I'd like to attach some numbers to it. ...
I've been toying with an idea for ages that I think could be pretty fun but I want to make sure it's not wildly unrealistic before going too far with it. The idea is that the Equator is fiercely h...
My story involves everyone in the year 2015 suddenly disappearing. What would visitors to Earth find if they arrived in the year 12015, or 10,000 years after we all disappeared? Assume none of our ...
Ignoring the fact that we need water in order to survive, what would happen if all of the "oceans" on Earth were filled with a dense non-reactive gas (e.g. xenon or sulfur hexafluoride) instead of ...
Is there a way to split a tectonic plate into two plates? or a way to alter their motion? -What would the impact of a such a change up here on the surface? I know that plate tectonics is run by gi...
