Posts tagged geology
I am trying to construct a terrestrial planet that is almost entirely made of silicates but with a core that's able to generate a magnetic field. I really don't want to use iron, nickel, or cobalt,...
Is it physically possible for a complex crater to form and remain stable after an impact event large enough to deform the Earth's crust globally, insofar that the surface of the planet becomes unre...
These humans must never see the ocean and should still be able to survive. They can only get out of the land if they improve the technology level. Is it even possible? The lakes or seas should prob...
A part of the story I am writing involves two continents that centuries before the story takes place sunk into the sea. I want to have a way to explain this that does not come down to just the sea...
I need a huge natural plateau to form but with a slope. There can be some variation, a few hills or even mountains here and there, but the ground needs to be mostly gently sloping north to south. ...
So I had this idea of a world with an ocean sized pool of super hard glass that formed millions of years ago on this planet. I started to think of the implications of something like that: In some...
I initially assumed my world was going to be pure fantasy, but the more I think about it, the more I consider having the story take place somewhere on Earth, either as alternate history or the far ...
One popular theory to explain how Earth got its water is that it was delivered by asteroid/comet/etc. The form this theory usually takes is that many small impacts occured over a long time, each d...
There's an important aspect of my headworld involving volcanoes which I planned many years ago. Recently I revisited this concept to refine it further, only to run into a few questions that I've b...
My world has giant geysers. The height of these geysers oscillates over a cycle of 3 or so days. Things you need to know: 1. There is an unknown force in the core of the planet, which exerts pres...
Im working on a story about a new exoplanet discovery and its subsequent "Near Future" colonization. The planet is close to its parent star. As such, I have decided to give it a sizeable molten ir...
The Crystal Desert is a Sahara-like expanse of sand, dotted with numerous large clusters of crystal, and containing numerous monolithic sandstones. What would we expect Thra geologists to determine...
In our world, mountains generally only move up (while forming) or down (while eroding or sinking). Otherwise they follow the tectonic plates they happen to be on. In island chains like the Hawaiian...
In an effort to gain inspiration for planetary formation and, at the same time, inspiration for governmental/territorial boundaries between residents of said formed planets, I've recently encounter...
I have some ideas regarding this, but thought I would check to see what you guys can come up with, as I found some of the ideas here often trump mine in originality and/or plausibility. So, I hav...
Properly ventilating a deep mine is a significant engineering challenge. Ergo, you don't want to be carrying around torches that use up some of your precious breathing oxygen if you don't absolutel...
Given an arbitrarily long time to do so, what is the maximum depth too which a dwarven civilization could practically extend their mines / cities? And what would be the final limiting factor preven...
Scenario + question: So for the purposes of this question lets so that there is a canyon much like the grand canyon but about 50 miles deeper, so the bottom is always in shadow and it has no observ...
BACKGOUND I'm working on a region for my world, and I have a very distinct idea of what I want the physical landscape to look like. Below is a description of what I'd like for the land, and an app...
Suppose an earth-like world with roughly 500 major tectonic plates. Question What is the plausibility of such a world to sustain (large) continents? Why? Further clarifications: speed of pla...
I'm in some urgent need of advice about linking together biomes in a realistic manner. Can a taiga connect to an alpine tundra to the north, and a steppe to the south? Then what would branch off of...
If a planet like Crait existed and was covered by (mostly) white sand, what would its average albedo be? Crait is a planet from Star Wars that has a thin layer of white salt on its surface.
Premise This is a world in which humans are blissfully unaware of their own vulnerability. Needless to say, there are many vulnerabilities to address, however, this question deals only with the vu...
I'm creating a world for a webcomic and I'm running into some difficulties "“ namely, my own limitations. I'm not a scientist, and I don't even know how to start asking the questions I want answere...
I want to build a habitable desert gas-giant moon and I´m not sure how little water I can give it and still get plate-tectonics instead of an Io-like lid-tectonic setup. I want plate tectonics bec...
Premise I recently recalled when the Chelyabinsk meteor crashed overhead in 2013. The pressure wave was immense. The infrasounds, as recorded by nuclear missile detectors, appeared to traverse the...
My current project features a contemporary scientist who is convinced that some sort of spacetime anomaly occurred in a tiny rural Yorkshire, U.K. community circa-1850; he believes a dilapidated ol...
The Question of the Tunnel through a Planet grinds my mind. How could you dig a Hole through the fluid mantle of a planet? Would your walls not constantly break and collapse on you after the 15-...
I'm trying to find someone (s) with enough geology knowledge to help me figure out some of the specifics of the world I'm building. (Earth-like in age, distance from star, size, tilt) I'm doing my ...
What would happen to an earth-like planet where an event caused a large (think, the size of the Caribbean tectonic plate) section of the crust to get peeled away, exposing the upper mantle for a pe...
Earth's deepest point, the Challenger Deep, is almost seven miles below sea level. By contrast, Europa is smaller than even Earth's moon, yet its oceans are anywhere between 40-100 miles deep! So t...
I want to know about the plausibility and required parameters of the following scenario: Take an Earth-like planet, about the same size, composition and gravity. It has no plate tectonics to speak...
The People of The Shining Isles have long been exploited. They are cruelly used in mines, excavating tonne after tonne of rock and dirt in pursuit of what the Warriors from Away call "˜diamonds'. T...
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...
For the sake of analogy, let's take the Chixclub impactor and move it a mountain range akin to the modern Himalayas. Obviously we're dealing with an extinction level event here so I'm not concerned...
I thought of a concept for a dragon or similarly gigantic reptile with a special adaptation, in which they're born with scales made almost entirely of carbon. Then, over an incredibly long life cyc...
Recently, I came across an inverted world map on the MapPorn Reddit made by MChainsaw. "Inverted" as in, the "continents" are now below sea level and the "ocean floors" are high and dry. (Conside...
I don't wanna reveal too much about my world, however, the basic idea is that there is a town of people who live deep underwater (they are biologically capable of doing underwater gas exchange and ...
Let's say that some Oriental emperor had decreed that he should move his palatial residence from China to Everest. Specifically, he wanted Mount Everest to be his palace, which means hollowing the...
Our planet has a surface full of silicates and a core made of iron. It's due to this that Earth is the way it mostly is - most rocks and many minerals contain some form of silica. But what about a ...
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'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...
This is the third in a series of 5 (at this point) questions. It's not relevant to this question, but for anyone who's curious this was the first, this the second. Conditions for this question are...
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...
Basically, I want to freeze the technology of earth at a level reminiscent of pre-Industrial Revolution Europe. I'm trying to figure out what substance or material would have to be absent from the...
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...
So I'm working on a home-brew D&D setting and I have this idea for the my campaign to take place in a large isolated Valley completely surrounded by mountains. I also had the idea to have these...
We know that Mars has a reddish color, because its ground consists of iron-based compounds. The moon is grey-whiteish because it consists mostly of silicon-based compounds. What element should the...
A spaceship flew across an unclassified region of the Milky Way galaxy and found a Super Earth in an unnamed system. The planet is almost twice as massive as Earth and is orbiting fairly far away ...
The established fact is that the shape of a planet's continental coastlines is determined by the planet's climate. Higher temperatures mean less ice, which ultimately means higher sea levels. (Ca...
