World-Building Geography Help: Polar Seas

[grodog]

A quick aside: Eric Anondson, you're being sought over on the GH WotC boards: http://boards1.wizards.com/showthread.php?t=354889

 

[AdmundfortGeographer]

A quick aside: Eric Anondson, you're being sought over on the GH WotC boards

Thanks grodog! I'm up, up and away!


Regards,
Eric Anondson (... with great power, comes great responsibility... *ahem*)

 

[GuardianLurker]

Back to that map of Mars a few posts up...

What kind of climate would a world like that have, assuming it was earthlike in all other respects (size, distance from sun, etc)? Would there still be an icecap at the poles? Would the equatorial coasts be tropical like they are on earth? Would most of the southern hemisphere be a big desert?

1) Varied, probably covering the same range as earth, but a lot more uniform in distribution. Your primary determinant will be height/distance from shore; as you approach the center of the southern continent, it gets colder and drier. Most of the middle-continent will be like the Central United States - dry grasslands.

2) At the north (ocean pole), probably. The southern (land) pole, maybe. It depends. It's extremely dry, but any preciptation at all will tend to stay there and never melt. Since we're talking geologic time-scale, even 2 cm a century (the least amount of preciptation here on Earth) adds up to kilometer-thick ice sheets over a million years.

3) Yep.

Something else to consider - having a stationery and think continental mass, like the one on the map, or Pangaea, or modern Antartica, is an unstable situation on a tectontically active planet. Eventually the tectonic stress shatters the continent, forming new plates that begin to roam over the globe. Of course, that's "unstable" on a geologic time scale - massive earthquakes and rifts don't have to be a issue unless you want them to be.

 

[Sado]

1) Varied, probably covering the same range as earth, but a lot more uniform in distribution. Your primary determinant will be height/distance from shore; as you approach the center of the southern continent, it gets colder and drier. Most of the middle-continent will be like the Central United States - dry grasslands.

Hmm, so the more advanced civilizations would probably all be closer to the equatorial coastal regions, and the higher southern latitudes would be populated by nomadic tribes of hunters and herdsmen? I'm starting to like this as much as my original idea.