Posts by SealBoi
The antagonist of my story trades steel with a non-human, and non-humanoid, race, in return for a magical substance. They place great value in steel as they cannot manufacture it themselves. That i...
Some islands can survive for very long. Madagascar, for example, has been around for 80-100 million years and is likely to remain isolated for hundreds of millions of years more. Volcanic islands,...
Creating a map of Koppen climate zones for a very Earth-like world is quite easy, with the right instructions. However, what if the climate is several degrees cooler? Do I simply shift all the clim...
Melange, also known as "the spice", is a fictional drug in Frank Herbert's famous Dune series, which has many benefits (and some drawbacks). In this series of questions, I'll try to see how many of...
There are a number of places in which cumulonimbus clouds - and therefore, thunderstorms - are likely to form, such as: Cold fronts, where masses of cold air move into hot, moist air masses Aroun...
Earth's atmosphere, as you probably know, is divided into five layers - the troposphere, stratosphere, mesosphere, thermosphere and exosphere. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Earth#Str...
During much of the Late Pleistocene stage, the world's most widespread biome was the so-called "mammoth steppe" - a cold, dry grassland which spanned eastward all the way from Spain to Canada. It w...
I had an idea for a planet which has very hot days, roughly 40 degrees C on average, and very cold nights, average -5 degrees. These figures are subject to change. Of course, there are places which...
The Guivre is an amphibious dragon from French mythology: Many of its aspects are typical of Western dragons, but there are two which distinguish it from others: Its breath causes disease It c...
Subarenaceous animals are those which can move long distances through dry sand - like sandfish lizards, or Dune's sandworms. The main problem they have to tackle is turning the sand immediately aro...
In the mythology of the Lambas people of Zambia, there is a creature called the Ichisonga. It is a herbivore, and very rhinoceros-like in appearance. Upon hearing a hippopotamus, it allegedly sne...
A cool thing to imagine would be a world where the land was dominated by megafaunal frog-descendants, as it is/was by mammals today, dinosaurs before the mammals, and non-mammalian synapsids and cr...
The dragons in my fantasy world spit fluid from their mouths when threatened, which upon contact causes a burning sensation. I could have this liquid be standard venom, like modified saliva, but I ...
Sonic weapons are frequently used by military circles as non-lethal irritants to deter opponents. My question is; could a naturally evolved organism kill, or at least incapacitate, small prey using...
This is the latest in a long series of questions I've asked on my fantasy world which contains many mythical and folkloric creatures. I won't link the other questions since at this stage the series...
James Cameron's Avatar featured floating mountains which stayed aloft due to the Meissner effect; they contained large quantities of the room-temperature superconductor unobtainium, which, due to t...
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...
On a habitable world completely covered in water, with no land above sea-level, there would presumably be storms of biblical proportions. Suppose this world has oceans so deep that the deeper layer...
Around Earth's equator, there's a band of low pressure called the Doldrums. 30 degrees north and south are bands of high pressure called the horse latitudes. Finally, there are more low-pressure ba...
My current ongoing project, about which I've asked many questions, is about a world in which evolutionarily plausible legendary and folkloric creatures roam the Earth. One such creature is the sea ...
Medieval bestiaries describe a creature, a type of desert-dwelling ant that digs for gold. It was also said to be the size of a fox, but I'll ignore that in this question. Why would ants unearth p...
Take a planet like Gliese 1214 B, which has no land, an ocean 100s of kilometres deep and a seabed of Ice VII. For the purposes of the question, let's assume that the pressure and/or temperature ne...
A creature I am imagining is a small mammal about the size of a domestic cat which - through symbiotic bacteria which live in its fur - is covered its whole body over in blue-white bioluminescence,...
This is not a duplicate of Building Noah's Ark or Can We Build Noah's ark?, because the former asks only about a relatively small number of species and the latter is set in Biblical times. Ignori...
In a previous question - How might kinetosynthesizing "plants" look? - I introduced a worldbuilding thought experiment of mine centered around a habitable moon, heated by tidal forces, which orbits...
