A question to the Robotech fans concerning the Zentradi Bombardment

[Edena_of_Neith]

I have watched the Robotech video known as Force of Arms.
I have also read the part of the book Force of Arms where the Zentradi Bombardment occurred.

The player's guide to Robotech seems to differ from the book and the video, concerning what Earth looked like afterwards.

- - -

The initial Zentradi Bombardment of Earth involved four million ships, who fired their great guns down on the planet, causing explosions of thermonuclear magnitude with each hit.
The Earth's surface area is just under 200 million square miles, so this comes to 1 multimegaton hit per every 50 square miles (a 7 mile by 7 mile area, roughly.)

It is reasonable to assume that this came close to sterilizing the planet.
In the United States, the entire population was killed.
The Great Salt Lake evaporated. The Great Lakes evaporated. The Mississippi River and it's tributaries evaporated.

For that matter, the Arctic Ice melted, and the whole Arctic Ocean evaporated.
The Greenland Ice Cap went up in a blaze of superheated steam.
The Bombardment was sufficient to melt the great Antarctic Ice Caps, sending them roaring up in steam clouds, or thundering as hot water down into the ocean basins.

The great oceans either evaporated or mostly evaporated (I am not clear on this one.)

The Earth was enveloped in one great cloud of debris, dust, and steam, which filled the troposphere and stratosphere, and billowed up even into near space.

After the Zentradi were defeated and their fleet destroyed, the race of man spent decades repairing the Earth, and the waters of the planet rained back down on the surface in a Noah's Flood scene.

It is reasonable to assume this great rain carried away vast amounts of topsoil, stripping all the lands, and filling all the oceans with muck.
It is also reasonable to assume that many, if not most, of the craters were filled with muck from the mudslides caused by the rain, and thus disappeared.

Here, then, is what I envision in the post-Bombardment era:

There is no Greenland, Arctic, or Antarctic ice.
There is no ice on the Earth.
Earth's oceans are warm, ranging from 70 to 80 degrees Fahrenheit at the bottom (22 to 27 degrees Celsius), and in the 80s and 90s at the top.
The climate of the Earth is entirely tropical outside of the polar regions, and subtropical there.

The oceans are 1,000 feet higher than they were, because of thermal expansion of the warmed water, and from meltwater from the Icecaps.
As a result, Florida, the whole of the southeastern coastal plain, the whole of the Mississippi River valley, and parts of the Midwest are flooded.
In Canada, Hudson Bay is enormous, more than twice it's previous size.
The Amazon is flooded all the way west to the Andes, and vast parts of the rest of South America are flooded.
Most of Europe is flooded, leaving a great archpelego of islands, which stretch from the Iberian Peninsula to the Ural Mountains, and from the mountains of Greece north and northwest to the Highlands of Scotland and the mountains of Scandanavia.
Half of Australia is flooded.
Great estuaries stretch into eastern Siberia, and the whole of the western Siberian Lowland is flooded, along with coastal China and most of extreme southeast Asia. Indonesia has lost Java, most of Sumatra, and all the other islands are much smaller.
Greenland rings an inland sea, while the mountains of Antarctica stick defiantly up out of the water.

Radiation floods the earth.
Radiation lights the deepest waters of the oceans.
Radiation glows from hundreds of thousands of points on land.

A lifeless desert sticks up out of the swollen oceans.
North America, once green and blue, is stripped to the bone, the Appalachian Range jutting up like teeth out of the waste.
Lake Superior has been refilled, but it's coastlines are altered due to the mudslides and the fact much of the lake-bed was filled with debris.
The Mississippi flows again, but great lakes interrupt it's flow all along it's way, where the Zentradi weapons gouged out holes in the earth.
The warm Gulf Stream now passes west of Florida, and over Georgia, flowing up past the eastern side of the Appalachians. Thence it flows over what used to be the East Coast Megapolis, over the shallow sea that covers Nova Scotia, and it flows around Newfoundland, cradling it in it's warm embrace. Finally, it flows almost straight northward, flowing where the frigid Labrador current once was, and it turns east only after running into southern Greenland.

Siberia is now a warm land, and even in the depths of winter, snow falls only in the high mountains.
Lake Bakali has been refilled, but is much shallower than before due to mudslides. The lake is pleasantly warm the year around.
The heights of Tibet are now badlands, filled with craters and debris, areas destroyed by mudslides and avalanches, a treacherous warren of weakened rock and debris through which travel is well nigh impossible.
Japan remains, and looks almost like it did before, since most of it is highlands or mountains. But there are no forests on the mountains, no birds, no animals, just an endless barren emptiness. Thus it is for Japan, and thus it is for all of Asia.

Africa has lost only one quarter of it's land to the swollen seas, since most of that continent was high in elevation.
But Africa's famed savannas and deep forests are gone, incinerated by the Godlike barrage of the Zendradi, and a steaming waste throws the sun's light back in hideous, glaring browns and yellows.

Now ...

How close did I come to envisioning the Earth as it would actually BE, after the four million hits from the Zendradi guns (each a thermonuclear level blast), and after the people in the ST1 worked to clear the atmosphere and restore the water?

 

[Wolf72]

holy heck that was a lot!!! ... um great research, observations, and conclusions.

that was a catclysm and a half, unless they have some way to clean up the radiation it will be a problem ... or the authors went a wee bit overboard in their estimates so it might not be as deadly as I'm thinking it is.

 

[Edena_of_Neith]

Well, I guess the point was that the Earth was forever altered.

There were indeed four million Zentradi ships.
They all had massive cannons of some sort, and these cannons each fired a beam at the Earth.
Each hit was in the many megaton range.

That comes to one multimegaton hit for every 50 square miles of the Earth's surface.

Enough firepower that, in my opinion, we are talking about the near complete sterilization of the Earth, and the obliteration of many of Earth's geographical features.

For example, Lake Erie is very large in size, but it is very shallow.
It evaporated during the Bombardment.
When the rains came, they would have caused vast floods that would have carried countless tons of silt down from Ohio and Southern Ontario into the lake.
Thus, Lake Erie disappeared.
Then, the rising oceans enveloped Lake Erie, and it was thus truly gone.
The outlet of the drainage from Lake Superior was forever altered.

The Grand Canyon, one of the most magnificent and beautiful places in North America, would have collapsed in the Bombardment.
As titantic earthquakes shook the ground, and massive explosions detonated on the surface, the walls of the Grand Canyond would have caved in, an avalanche of unheard of proportions, of rock and debris, tumbling down into the Colorado River, effacing it from the surface of the Earth.
What would remain afterwards would be badlands sticking up out of a sea of muck (caused by the deluge of rain as Earth's water returned to the surface.)

Apparently, the Robotech people were able to remove the radiation, or at least remove or quell it in certain areas, so that cities like Macross could be safely built on the surface.

There is an inconsistancy between the film/book, and the results that should have occurred.

For instance, the Amazon and it's animals is a part of later Robotech literature.
However, in the scenario I envisioned, nearly all of the Amazon region was flooded by the ocean.
Nevermind that the Amazon Rainforest and all it's animals were reduced to ashes and flinders in the Bombardment.

India is listed as having survived (and later, survived a SECOND Bombardment, as another race briefly conquered Earth.)
However, in the scenario I envisioned, India was sterilized in the Bombardment.
Later, the oceans flooded the entire Ganges River Valley, and much of India was swalloed by the sea.

In North America, assuming the land could somehow be restored, crops could be grown ... in central and northern Canada.
The climate was more moderate at these high latitudes (that is to say, not a steaming tropical rainforest climate.)
The breezes off of the warm Hudson Bay would have made for excellent weather in central and northern Quebec, and in Labrador.

In the High Plains of the United States, tropical plants would grow, and in the extremely high plateaus and mountain slopes, one would find temperate plants.
But not Old Faithful, in Yellowstone.
The Bombardment did not unleash the titantic volcanic explosion that might have occurred (and which will occur, in about 20,000 years or so, IRL, because of the vast chamber of magma under the region.)
However, the Bombardment wrecked the surface, and all the vents of steam caved in or were shattered, and new vents formed, amidst a region now converted to Badlands.

As for eastern North America ... well, a part of Michigan can still be seen, sticking up out of the ocean.
The Appalacian Mountains still run from Quebec down to Georgia.
The Appalacian Mountains are much gentler and lower in height than they were, because every mountaintop and high place was blown to pieces, or went cascading down in ruin during the deluge.
A tropical rainforest would start to grow here, east of the flooded Mississippi River Valley.

As for the great cities of North America ... they are gone.
Simply gone.
Pieces of twisted steel, slagged concrete, and other debris (not very much debris ...) are the only signs that a civilization ever existed here.

The great underground places, like the Salt Mines of Detroit, NORAD, the deep bunkers, the Coal Mines of the Appalacians ... some of these still remain, but there is extensive damage, a lot of cave ins, and water from the surface has flooded most of these places.
Silt brought by the deluge of water has sealed these places up, and one must know exactly where to look, and dig deep, to find them now.

This is the world left from the Zentradi Bombardment.
The ST1 returned with many skilled people, and mankind returned to the Earth.
But it was a strange and different Earth from what they had ever known.

My impressions of the Aftermath are somewhat different from what is found in the sourcebooks.

How they managed to save and return the animal life of the Earth is quite beyond me.
How they returned the ocean plankton, the coral reefs, the sea life, the plant life dependent on insects, and the insects themselves ... I do not know.

 

[Marcantony]

If by players book you mean the palladium one then Id ignore it totally. They got so much wrong in their game its unbelievable. One example being the Lancer fighter in the rpg which in reality was meant to be a destroyer. How could they make such a huge error?

 

[JacktheRabbit]

How? Simple, the game was written by Kevin. He has to be among the top 5 of worst game designers of all time.

If by players book you mean the palladium one then Id ignore it totally. They got so much wrong in their game its unbelievable. One example being the Lancer fighter in the rpg which in reality was meant to be a destroyer. How could they make such a huge error?

 

[GuardianLurker]

Edena -

I'd have to agree with your conclusions IF I felt the Robotech anime (or any anime at all, for that matter) correctly portrayed explosions. Most explosions in anime, especially ones observed in orbital bombardments are probably overstated by a factor of 10 or more. Further reducing the impact - not all of the Zentradei ships fired their guns.

For that matter, your calculations assume a relatively even distribution; such was not the case, as Doza concentrated his fire on heavily populated areas (in fact we see shots of several missiles striking the same targets). Large areas with extremely low population density, like the Amazon, Siberia, the American Midwest, etc. most likely escaped the direct effects of the bombardment. This can be directly seen on the "damage map" in the video. The after effects would probably still be severe, and you've described many of them. Life on land would certainly undergo an extinction event.

Even the characters in the anime recgonize this. "The whole planet." "Are they all dead?" "Probably."

However, very little bombardment of the oceans seems to have happened, so sterilization is far from being a possibility. The long-term raising of the ocean's temperature to 20-30 degrees Celsius is also highly improbable. Also, the complete melting of all the ice caps is likely to only cause a rise of about 100 meters maximum, and while that dooms just about all the major cities (which tend to be coastal), the shorelines don't change in shape all that much. (An interesting tool to explore this hypothesis BTW, is Fractal Terrains.)

Moreover, we have no direct evidence that the Zentradei weapons were nuclear in nature; at least some of the weapons used were energy-beam weapons, and others may have been purely kinetic. In fact, it's not even established (AFAIK) that the Zentradei (or the Robotech Masters or Invid) even possess nuclear technology. So radiation was probably not a major concern (though there was obviously some).

Actually, having just watched the relevant parts of the episode, I'm afraid the player's book is more accurate to the anime than your vision. This begs the question of whether or not the *anime* was accurate in its depiction, and that's not something I'm fully competent to judge, though my suspicions are things wouldn't be as bad as you portrayed.

 

[LostSoul]

A couple things to remember, here:

Rick flies down to Alaska (where the grand cannon survived the attack!) shortly after the bombardment. Lisa survived the whole thing. They are out in the open and (I think) they can still see the stars.

In later Robotech shows (the Invid Invasion), you can see the coastline of North and South America. They look pretty much the same as today. The Great Lakes are still there. New York is still there, with the Statue of Liberty.

So I doubt the level of destruction (in Robotech; Macross might be a whole different story) is as bad as you portray.

 

[Edena_of_Neith]

Let us assume, then, that the explosions from the Zentradei cannons are reduced by a factor of 10 from what I envisioned (that is, the explosions are only in the kiloton range.)
Let us assume, also, that only half of the Zentradei fleet (2 million ships) fired.

Let us also assume that, as stated above, the fire was concentrated on major population centers and military targets.

And finally, let us assume the hits had no nuclear components, thus releasing no radiation or leaving behind any long term radiation.

- - -

The initial bombardment destroys all cities, metropolitan areas, and most of the larger towns, across the entire Earth.
Nearly all military bases are hit, and most are destroyed.

Subsequently, massive firestorms rage across the planet, as all combustible material in the cities burns away.

Forested regions ignite from the heat, and there are no firefighting attempts.
Vast regions of forest burn, including nearly all of the woodlands in Europe, large parts of the vast Siberian taiga, and great parts of the forests of the United States and Canada.
There are major praire fires in North America, South America, Africa, central Asia, and southern Australia.
However, damage is quite limited in South America, central Africa, southeastern and eastern Asia (including Indonesia), and northern Australia for the simple reason that heavy rains are normal in these areas, and the forests are wet, and fires will not burn through wet vegetation.

Only in areas suffering drought or undergoing the normal dry season see firestorms within the forested areas.

The attack is insufficient to throw much debris or dust into the stratosphere.
What happens instead is that a colossal mess is made in the troposphere, which fills with smoke and dust.
This smoke and dust will quickly settle out of the troposphere in (heavily polluted) rain and by other means.

There is little to no effect on Earth's climate.
Thus, there is no change in the level of the oceans, no change in their temperature, and no extinction of sea life.
The polar ice is unaffected.

This is, indeed, much more like the scenario envisioned in later Robotech videos and in the Robotech sourcebooks.

There is one minor problem with all of this, though.

I happen to live in the Detroit Metropolitan Area.
I happen to have seen a picture of New Detroit, on the online Robotech site (or, at least, one of the online Robotech sites.)

I have seen New Detroit.
I can reasonably assume New Detroit is approximately where old Detroit used to be.

So ...

Where is the Huron River?
Where is the Rouge River?
Where is the Detroit River?
Where is Lake St Clair?
Where is Lake Erie?
Where are the gentle slopes of the Irish Hills?
Where are the ruins that should be left over from a kiloton level attack?
Where is the vegetation that should have quickly started regrowing (grass, brush, saplings, etc.)

I see nothing but a cratered desert here.
If the attack was in the kiloton range, I should be seeing all of the above.

However, if the attack was in the colossal range that I first credited it, then the blasted, cratered, and empty desert I see around New Detroit would make sense.

What is your take on this, then?

 

[Umbran]

What is your take on this, then?

That continuity and technical accuracy are not the primary concern of anime.

 

[Edena_of_Neith]

LOL!

Anime is very popular, though.
It's doing something right!