Posts tagged earth
If this earth were cubed shape would it be possible for Magellan to prove that the earth is cube-shaped without going to space and looking at earth? It might seem strange to think that earth might...
I was recently introduced to the South Atlantic Anomaly. As I understand, for satellites and space craft, this is a natural feature that can wreck space craft by taking even computers designed fo...
Earth's rotation is slowing down, and in this article Randall Munroe gives some ideas to accelerate the rotation - or at least to keep it from slowing down as quickly. He concludes that the only "s...
In 2015 we can rewind the TV, our CCTV footage and, if we wear an action cam, our latest adventure. However if we walk down the street and something happens we didn't quite catch, the annoying fact...
I would like to have Earth slowly move away from the sun, taking somewhere between several months and a couple of years to reach the point where human life on the surface is no longer possible. (T...
In the story I'm writing, Earth gets destroyed and the few million humans that survive go to live on another Earth-like planet. Since the destruction of the planet, the humans do visit their star...
In an alternate Earth, early or midway in the Eocene Epoch, there debuted a family of angiosperm trees whose roots need to be completely submerged. As a result, the limit is that they can't germin...
First things first, a little backstory: Sometime between the Paleocene and Eocene epochs, there was a mysterious, sudden, dramatic rise in global temperature. This moment in time was known as the...
I was zooming around on Space Engine and came across the moon of a gas giant that was hovering well above the galactic plane. I'm admittedly not well-versed in under what conditions an Earth-like p...
Welcome to planet X! Planet X is the same as Earth in radius, composition, axial tilt and orbits star Y (identical to the Sun). Planet X has a moon known as moon Z (identical to Earth's moon). Cou...
I'm building an earthlike world that has a moon orbiting a gas giant. Is it possible for the moon to always be between the planet and the sun? Also, is it possible for a moon to rotate around its o...
Space explorers have landed on an Earth like planet and, to their surprise, the place is luscious and covered in life, to the point of resembling some earthly tropical atoll. What they don't know ...
Some 55.8 million years ago, Earth underwent a really dramatic heat wave known as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, or PETM. What happened, exactly? We don't know how it happened, but we do k...
So long ago, I asked on how to make Earth's oceans as brackish as Lyr's, one of the many worlds imagined by artist Chris Wayans. The only real answer I got was something that that world had alread...
The setting I've cooked up for a D&D campaign I'm running features a fair amount of buildings that have been totally abandoned by civilization for hundreds or even a thousand years. Obviously w...
Say the word "Australia", and one of the first things to come to your mind would be the marsupials. Of the 334 species of pouched mammals whose earliest ancestors witnessed the fall of the dinos...
I am creating a fantasy world in which Earth has a second moon with an orbit between Earth and the current moon. The orbit of this new moon is faster because it's closer to earth. I'm not much co...
This is the world's tallest tree--the coast redwood. It can grow as high up as 115.5 meters. Any taller, and the transportation of water in its vascular tissues would not climb all the way. Bu...
I was considering Kessler syndrome, however this is not a long-enough duration and I'm unaware of a way to prolong it for the course of several millennia. I don't want Earth to be destroyed, just...
Back home, five million years ago, the warm, wet climate of the Miocene sloped downwards into the cooler, drier Pliocene before descending even further into the more so Pleistocene. The slope was ...
Imagine Earth was hit hard by some force so devastating that Earth now has an axial tilt of 90.0 degrees, a far cry from the usual 23.5 degree. The same force somehow eliminates the Moon. In my sto...
EDIT: Calculations were incorrect, the earth in my comic is not 5.8x larger, it is 2.4x larger. Its surface area is 5.8x larger but the diameter is 2.4x larger. Anyway I'm working on a comic tha...
Somewhere on DeviantArt, there is an insightful tutorial by someone named "Uzlo" on how to create anatomically believable angels. Among the instructed details is the possibility of developing a se...
This, ladies and gentlemen, is Melalo, described in the Book of Creatures website as "the oldest and most feared of Ana's children." His name literally means "filthy", "dirty" or even "obscene"....
Atlantis is real. It's just that there's more than one of them, and none of them are actually called "Atlantis". Instead, they consist from the Kerguelen Plateau in the Indian Ocean to Zealandia,...
I want to know if a planet with an atmosphere identical to that of Earth could be big enough so that from no point in the lower atmosphere it would be possible to appreciate the curvature in relati...
Lets say an alien trickster wants to trick a group of human astronauts into thinking they've been transported to another world far away. But in reality, he wants them to stay on good old Earth, thr...
Background A large star makes a relatively close approach to a solar system like our own and the orbits of many of the planets are badly perturbed. A planet similar to Earth is in the wrong place a...
In exploring likely candidates for an alternate Earth without rodents, someone suggested multituberculates to me. Here's a little summary as to who the multituberculates were for anyone not in the ...
If the earth's oceans were electrocuted (from the ocean floor), not worrying about how the energy is gotten to electrocute it, what would happen too everything in the ocean,( fish, algae, etc.) wha...
The muroids are a superfamily of rodents consisting today of mice, rats, voles, hamsters, lemmings and gerbils. There are at least 1750 different species of them, proof apparent of their environme...
I've been trying to create a Earth-like planet but I'm not sure if my planet's atmosphere is breathable. (It's mostly the amount of helium I'm worried about). I've tried to make it Earth-like whil...
"The Dark Knight" is a nickname given by astronomers to the exoplanet TrES-2b, a gas giant with an albedo of one percent, blacker than paint, blacker than coal"”in fact, blacker than anything on Ea...
From 2.4 to either 2.1 or two billion years ago, Earth underwent a surge in a waste product that we know as "oxygen". Before that, life thrived in an ocean rich with iron under an atmosphere loade...
I want to create a world where humans can live outside (perhaps with some protective clothing) but where very high winds exist in almost all potentially habitable areas making life outside impossib...
The setting is in a region of a planet comparable to Earth's California in regards to location. The soil is extremely rich in nutrients and subsurface water. But for the past three million years th...
Anyone who has studied ice ages would know that during the last two-and-a-half million years of Earth's history, there have been periods where there was enough ice to suck up a lot of water. As a ...
A cleaner, narrower-focused improvement of How This Alternate Solar System Influences the Milankovitch Cycle, so not a duplicate. For further clarification, eccentricity is the shape of a planet's...
So imagine people were the size of house cats, and the world's land masses were scaled down accordingly (in volume). In comparison to the original size of the landmass, how big would England be? An...
We have earth at the beginning of the 15th century, and suddenly the biggest continent disappears. There is nothing left of it, no animals, people, lands, anything. I don't think the details of th...
In prehistoric times, there used to be a dwarf elephant species in many Mediterranean islands. They were about 1.5-2 meters high, but probably became extinct before the arrival of the first human b...
66 million years ago, something brought an end to the long-established dinosaur empire. The pendulum just kept shifting between an asteroid and a comet, astronomical bolides that actually have dif...
If humans lived on the inside of the earth's crust, what would happen if they climbed mountains? These mountains would stretch toward the burning center of the Earth. Would gravity get stronger the...
I am working on a story about a person who was raised on an earth-like planet and later moves to our earth. The planet he is from specializes in fruit juice and alcohol making, in specific, wine. W...
This is a slight continuation of my other post where I was trying to create realistic hollows with weather due to temperature changes due to bio minerals called Hearthstones. I was wondering if pla...
Short version A far future catastrophe burns/melts away large chunks of the Earth and Moon. For reasons related to my story's fantasy elements, the remains of the Moon have about one fifth their or...
In the event of our sun suddenly becoming a black hole or wormhole of sorts. It transports the earth to another solar system similar to ours. Would it be possible for our planet to start circling...
I'm working to design the atmosphere of a fictional planet inspired by Venus (let's call it Cael). Cael's atmosphere at an altitude of 50 km is essentially identical to Earth's atmosphere at sea l...
In a not so different fantasy world, whose physics and thus are similar to our own how would including penguins affect the look and function of a typical arctic ecosystem. For the purposes of this...
Conventionally, there are two ways to build mountains--direct collision (as is the case with the Himalayas) and one side sinking beneath the other (which explains why the Pacific Ring of Fire is vo...