Life on a planet with no land near poles
I have an Earth-sized planet in a Milky Way-like galaxy with all the land located at the equator, in a 2000-km line around the planet. There are small islands near the landmass, but no land anywhere near the poles. There are some glaciers, but for whatever reason, none ever formed near the poles or have ever floated there.
What would be the effect on the planet's flora and fauna, besides being well-adapted to heat?
Could this world even exist?
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1 answer
Building off @DustinJackson's answer, I'm going to posit a few ways that this planet would be different from earth to avoid an ice age.
First the orbit is a bit closer to the star, this adds more heat into the system. Second, the axial tilt is greater than earths, meaning more of the ocean (and pole) is exposed to the solar insolation. The other pole is going to get cold, but weather will help a bit and keep things circulating.
There will also be a lot more water vapor in the air, and water vapor is really good at being a greenhouse gas. which will help hold the heat in.
I can see storms getting pretty big, with less land to slow them down.
Because of the tilt, the climate will be temperate more than tropical. Maybe Florida instead of Ecuador.
Edit:
Earth's circumference is 40,075 km at the equator. A 2000 km band around the equator would be a bit over 80 million square km. That's basically the same area as Asia, Africa, and Europe, just so you have an idea of how much land you have to work with.
With no separate continents the only thing keeping flora and fauna from distributing evenly around the globe is elevation and natural obstacles like mountains.
Low elevations would be tropical. As the elevation rises you'd get more and more temperate.
About formation. Early on in the solar systems formation, two large mostly molten bodies of roughly the same size collided with a very low difference in orbital motion, meaning it was a "soft" impact. This threw up a ridge at what would become the equator, basically a splash as the molten material was squeezed out, and then it cooled. Over time as this young planet swung through the swirling gasses and material surrounding the young star it picked up an atmosphere and a lot of water. The early impact had shattered the large tectonic plates that had been forming on the two planetoids into countless small plates, which meant that geothermal heat could escape easily, warming the oceans and making them very mineral rich. It also prevented pressure buildups, so there was never enough pressure to create volcanoes that would reach the surface.
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